could derive from a combination of industrial pursuits with intensive agriculture, and of brain work with manual work.
The importance of such a combination has not escaped the attention of a number of students of social science. It was eagerly discussed some fifty years ago under the names of “harmonised labour,” “integral education,” and so on. It was pointed out at that time that the greatest sum total of well-being can be obtained when a variety of agricultural, industrial and intellectual pursuits are combined in each community; and that man shows his best when he is in a position to apply his usually-varied capacities to several pursuits in the farm, the workshop, the factory, the study or the studio, instead of being riveted for life to one of these pursuits only.
At a much more recent date, in the ‘seventies, Herbert Spencer’s theory of evolution gave origin in Russia to a remarkable work, The Theory of Progress,by M. M. Mikhailovsky. The part which belongs in progressive evolution to differentiation, and the part which belongs in it to anintegrationof aptitudes and activities, were discussed by the Russian author with depth of thought, and Spencer’s differentiation-formula was accordingly completed.
And, finally, out of a number of smaller monographs, I must mention a suggestive little book by J. R. Dodge, the United States statistician (Farm and Factory: Aids derived by Agriculture from Industries, New York, 1886). The same question was discussed in it from a practical American point of view.
Half a century ago a harmonious union between agricultural and industrial pursuits, as also between brain work and manual work, could only be a remote desideratum. The conditions under which the factory system asserted itself, as well as the obsolete forms of agriculture which prevailed at that time, prevented such a union from being feasible.