This non-utilitarian view of the origins of industry has, however, been driven to excess.There remains a large element of truth in the proverb 'Necessity is the mother of invention.' The earliest weapons and tools, adapted from sticks and stones and other raw material, were probably forced on the dawning intelligence of man by the hard facts of his struggle with hostile nature and his search for food.Fighting, hunting, mating, were presumably his first pursuits and the early arts or industries, at any rate on the male side, would be subsidiary to these pursuits.Any organised process or handling of matter which would make him a better fighter, hunter, suitor, would be likely to emerge as a craft or industry.This explains the apparent blend of utilitarian and non-utilitarian origins.In point of fact, most of the so-called ornamental activities and products have their evident biological uses.They are not mere playthings.The adornment of the human body, the use of tatoos and masks, drums and gongs and other play-products, are partly, no doubt, for mere glory of self-assertion, itself an instinctive craving, but also for courtship, for recognition and for frightening enemies.While, then, it remains true that the sportive and artistic impulses are conspicuous in the early crafts, it is a mistake to disparage the organic utility of these processes.After man has made provision for the present necessities of the body, his superfluous energy naturally tends, either to preparatory play, the practice or imitation of biologically useful actions, or else to explorative, constructive, and decorative work in handling such materials as present themselves.This curiosity about his surroundings, and the instinctive desire to construct and arrange them for his convenience, or for the dawning aesthetic satisfaction of his senses, or to impress the female of his race, these instincts undeniably coalesce with the drive of physical necessity to force man to apply his mind to the discovery and practice of the early arts and crafts.
But, though these distinctively male modes of manipulating the environment thus possess a utilitarian aspect, they do not furnish the beginnings of the chief industries which figure in civilised life.The beginnings of manufacture and of agriculture, as regular occupations, are commonly ascribed to women and to slaves.Those who conceive of the earliest human societies as matriarchal or gynaecocentric, the women forming fixed centres of order in the home and village, owning the children and the property attached to the home, regard women both as the inventors and the practitioners of the early handicrafts, including the cultivation of the soil.The beginnings of the arts of pottery, basket-******, building, clothes-******, as well as digging, planting, milling and other processes of preparing food, were doubtless women's work in the first instance, though they were probably raised to the position of regular industries when slavery became common.
It is, however, noteworthy that, even in those early handicrafts devoted to the most practical needs of life, the decorative instinct generally finds expression.Not only the weapons of the men, but the pots and pans and other domestic utensils of the women, carry carvings or mouldings, which testify to the play or art impulses.Leisure and pleasure thus appear as ingredients in the earliest industries.
To whatever source, then, we trace the origins of industry, to the use of weapons, snares and other male apparatus for the fight and hunt, to the instincts of play, imitation and adornment as modes of self-expression and of pride, or to the more distinctively utilitarian work of women and of slaves around the home, we find play or pleasure mingled with the work.
