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Thorstein Veblen examines the modern industrial system as a structure defined by the machine process and investment for profit. He analyzes how business enterprise and the pursuit of financial gain serve as the primary forces directing contemporary economic organization.

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The Theory Of Business Enterprise

change. His results, as well as his specific determination of the factors at work in this process of cumulative change, have been questioned ; perhaps they are open to all the criticisms levelled against them as well as to a few more not yet thought of ; but the scope and method given to Bcientific inquiry by Darwin and the generation whose spokesman he is has substantially not been (questioned, except by that diminishing contingent I of the faithful who by force of special training or ' by native gift are not amenable to the discipline of I the machine process. The characteristically modem science does not inquire about prime causes, design in nature, desirability of effecta, ultimate results, or eachatological consequences.

Of tlie two postulates of earlier modem science, — the quantitative equivalence and the qualitative equivalence of cause and effect, — the former has come practically to signify the balanced articula-

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 371

tion of the process of cumulative change ; the endeavor of the Positivists to erect this canon of quantitative equivalence into the sole canon of Bcienti6c truth, and so to reduce scientific theory to a system of

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