Love, the Law of Life

Power to vary is religious. While mankind was in its infancy and the inner power of growth was as yet undeveloped, economic action signified for the most part power to vary. Variation is an aspect of freedom. It gives rise to exchange. Wherefore, the earliest economic society had its origin through the practice of exchange. Everything which exhibited a novel variation had value. A treasure shell could serve in place of money.!

Today also in our capitalistic centers novelties become merchandise indiscriminately, for any object which appeals to our love of variation through any of the sensory organs is thus constituted a thing of value. I propose to give a somewhat detailed description of the economics of the senses.

Capacity for growth is a very recent discovery. Men have been from ancient times aware of individual growth; but social discovery and invention date only from the year 1760, when Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny.

The discovery of capacity for growth created industrial civilization. Capacity to vary created the economics of exchange, but capacity for growth gave birth to the economics of production. Mass production became fascinating. Great factories were built and industrial cities appeared. Men began to wonder if they were not themselves machines for mass production,

Growth is purposive, and growth within selection is interesting; but the mere ability to grow and produce is not at all interesting. Men have already become tired of the economics of growth.

We must at this point, however, consider the fact that interest, profits, land rentals, and all other so-called gains are based upon capacity for growth. Without this capacity men would grudge the investment of capital and it would be impossible to collect any income upon capital. The appearance of both investment and interest is due entirely to the ability of modern society to develop. But this ability is made possible by virtue of numerous other human powers. Collectors of interest and capitalists, however, place only capacity for growth in their calculations, and attempt to take all that they can get.. Herein was the origin of the socalled Marxian theory of surplus value.

Fundamentally, the emergence of surplus value is not the work of capital alone: it is due to inner capacity for growth. Development is possible not alone through muscular labor—Marx regarded this as of almost unique importance—but through all the inner powers, 2. e., through every activity, every feeling, every volition, in _ short, through every activity of personality. But however much capital is stored up, nothing at all is thereby increased. Thus the struggle has arisen between the laboring class, awake to inner human capacities, and the superficially thinking capitalist class.

Most economic acts have emphasized the two capacities for variation and for growth. Croce, observing that the economic acts of growth-capacity and variability belong to none of the three spheres of truth, goodness, or beauty, developed a fourth sphere which he termed utility.

But in economic action the value of selection, as compared with the other two qualities, does not play a very conspicuous réle. While selection is extremely ethical, it is, however, too internal. Wherefore, so long as the consciousness that the inner value of personality constitutes wealth is undeveloped, men are kept in subjection to external values. To those who awaken to inner selection, external wealth comes to lose its essential value. Here emerges Nietzsche’s “inversion”’ of value. The value of selection does not require merely superficial variability or blind capacity for growth. It adopts certain of the capacities for variation, discarding the others; and selects from the capacities for growth only those which accord with its own aim. Thus temperance possesses economic value; and religious devotion, the simple life, scientific living, asceticism, prayer, and other ethical and religious values come to be treated as possessing economic value.

In the foregoing paragraphs I have described briefly the ways in which values in the three spheres are sectionally severed, but I must in addition explain somewhat minutely how values become severed physically, psychically, and spiritually.

Man’s values are so variously diversified as to be almost comical. For example, among the physical values, there are the divisions into the economics of sight, of sound, of taste, of smell, of touch, and of motion. Heretofore, economics has not been divided in this manner, but only into demand and supply. It has been an economics of matter which overlooked both the demand and the supply of life, and endeavored to make its explanations by means of the material conditions of demand and supply.

For example, the economics of sight, if interpreted merely as seeing, would be brief; but there is first the problem of light. Since man wishes to see just as well by night as by day, he uses electric lights. Thus candles gave way to lamps, and lamps to electricity. Here appeared the economics of variability, not an economics of existence simply, but of variation. It is not even an economics of bread alone. The content of demand in the old economics is incomprehensible. The old economics overlooks economic psychology.

In order to admit light into our houses the manufacture of glass was begun; and to secure focalization of the light rays lenses and eyeglasses were made. In fact, it has been only in the last seventy years that men generally have come to wear glasses. As the result of all this, the economy of sight has been transformed. Inventions related to the sense of sight, regarded solely from an economic standpoint, have exercised a tremendous influence. Today, photography and motion pictures have reached a marvelous development. In the United States every day more than 15,000,000 people attend motion picture shows. The value of the equipment is $1,400,000,000, and the production of films amounts to $1,200,000,000 annually —ahbout double the amount of the national budget of Japan. Hence, the economics of sight is not to be lightly regarded.

Then there is the economics of color. People do not use colors solely to aid in the struggle for existence. Women select the colors of their dresses for the purpose of attracting admirers. For color economics in Japan millions of yen are expended in dyestuffs. People wish to wear colored materials whether they get enough to eat or not. It is said that the majority of the women employees of the Mitsukoshi Department Stores are undernourished, for the reason that they spend so little on their food: their bread economics is hard pressed by their color economics. The money spent in Japan alone by geisha and prostitutes for facial beautification amounts to more than $1,000,000 annually. The economics of women’s faces, then, represents a titanic sum. Besides, for the coloring of pictures and of buildings, immense outlays of money are required. To furnish variety for the eye, as for example in theaters, or by means of attractive calligraphy, printing types, documents, newspapers, and so forth, the economics of sight, as society progresses, acquires more importance than the economics of foods.

In the next place, there is the economics of taste. We eat bread as a rule, but we do not necessarily always eat what is required for nourishment. According to the investigations of Professor Chittenden upon the caloric value of foods, man does not need large quantities of food. About 1800 calories daily is sufficient. (It was formerly maintained that working men required from 3000 to 4000 calories.) But we do not measure calories when we eat: we demand variety, we eat what is palatable. In foodsalso there is change, evolution. People of the poorer classes eat rice and barley, but the upper classes secure bananas from the tropics, tea from China, coffee from Brazil, and delicacies of land and sea from every country of the world. In the development of the sense of taste also, we tend to have increasingly complex taste sensations. People will spend time and money to secure the specialties of certain popular restaurants. This taste economics is one which it is impossible for us to neglect. When a man feels he would be willing to die if only he could get a meal of his favorite food, then for him there is no other value in life as big as the taste of that dish. Though in such cases no absolute values reside, there do exist certain physical and partial values.

There are, moreover, variations in the content of the values in men’s individual aims. When these variations are presented to them, they experience extraordinary delight. 'The economics of today, 7. e., the capitalistic economics, goes no further than offering detached values—never the higher values. Whence we may understand the import of Jesus’ words, ‘‘Where your treasure is, there your heart is also.”’ Karl Marx, in his Das Kapital, Volume I, makes a similar statement, 1. e., that the capitalistic economics of the present looks only at goods, and falls down and worships them.

We have also the economics of hearing. We buy graphophones and pianos. It is said that Americans spend more than $1,200,000,000 annually for concerts. This is a subject for earnest thought.

There is, in the next place, the economics of speech. Without ability in speech, men cannot hold good positions in business. The greater a man’s ability in language, the better living he can command.

Furthermore, there is the economics of smell. Men demand tobacco, opium, perfumes, incense, etc. And there is the economics of touch—the liking for velvets and silks. In the matter of cotton, even, while in

Japan numbers 20 to 40 are commonly used, the working people of England demand number 60. In France, cotton that has the feel of silk is demanded. The French are not satisfied unless they can secure number 300 cotton. All this is due to the requirements of men’s sense of touch. While economists have heretofore considered mere demand without making any qualitative distinctions, today it has become imperative, in view of the demand for number 60 thread, for example, for them to acquaint themselves with psychological economics. The need for constructing such an economics, formerly unseen, is now fully realized. Whence the necessity for elaborating a true science of economics, e. g., psychological economics.

In the economics of sensation, the various changes drawn from psychic values become themselves values, all of them.

There is, finally, the economics of movement: we are athletic and derive keen pleasure from exercise. Therefore, books on athletics appear; and tennis nets, baseball bats, and other athletic equipment are required. Evidently, then, a psychological economics is demanded. All the objects which appeal to the sex feelings are traded in as things of value. Thus it comes about that the manufacture of articles exhibiting a high degree of sensory skill becomes in itself the concern of economics. Mechanics engaged in boring turbines are able to cut steel of a thousandth of an inch in thickness. In such operations skill and efficiency become matters of importance.

Modern economics is passing over from the materialistic to the psychic economics. ‘The rise of the economics of efficiency resulted from the basic will to use human energy most effectively, through the powers of variation and of growth.

There is even the economics of mentality. Presentday science universally employs symbols. For example, to express all the qualities of variation from zero to infinity, various symbols are used. This makes for mental economy. In gaining skills we make many experimental failures, and in so doing we gain the skill we are seeking to acquire. An example of this process is to be seen in the rat, which, when put into a box and taught the way to open the door, finally, after numberless failures, becomes able to open it. Through skill acquired, the aim is attained. Skills demand much uneconomical effort, but it is possible for us to omit the failures and adopt the successful methods of others. Such is the function of education. And since education makes it possible to effect great economies, prodigious amounts of money are expended upon it. Yet, from the standpoint of ideas in general, the purpose of education is not necessarily money making. We become students in order to study the science of the past 1400 years. Here we enter upon the economics of institutions of learning. Attending a school is called getting an education, yet this is an old erroneous idea, for school training is related to the powers of variation, selection, and growth. Knowledge is, essentially, an economics inseparable from these three powers. Every science comprises the cosmos. When we are endeavoring to discover a certain principle, we can in the laboratory observe the entire universe. We may examine the whole universe within one single element, a marvelous economy. The study of an embryo reveals the development of living forms all the way from the beginning of creation, another great economy.