d, the
assumptions which may have made the reproach seem pertinent. One cannot,
of course, suppose it to express a sheer general aversion to the useful
or an ascetic abhorrence of all satisfaction on principle. Puritanism,
aestheticism, and pedantry should be last resorts in any search for an
interpretative clue.

The distrust of Utilitarianism need be ascribed to none of these. It
comes instead from a conception of the true Utilitarian as a dull and
dogmatic being with no interests beyond the range of his own uninquiring
vision, no aspiration beyond the complacent survey of his own
perfections and no standards beyond the inventory of his own _bourgeois_
tastes and prejudices. The type is indeed not yet extinct in our day:
but is it plausible to charge a "new" philosophy with conspiring to
perpetuate it? Is Instrumentalism only philistinism called by a more
descriptive name? It professes at least to be a logic of hypothesis and
experiment, whereas for the perfect philistine there are no ultimate
problems and hence no logic but the logic of self-evidence. When
Instrumentalism speaks of needs and interests in its analysis of truth
and goodness does it then mean the needs and interests that define the
individual in what is sometimes invidiously termed a "biological"
sense--interests that control him before his conduct becomes in any way
a problem for himself? Quite as a matter of course, just this has been
the assumption. The satisfactoriness of prompt and cogent classification
has had a hand in the vindication of truth's supremacy over
satisfaction. In the view of instrumentalism this ready interpretation
of its meaning is nothing less than the thinking of the unthinkable and
the bodying-forth of what is not. The man who has solved a problem
simply _is_ not the man he was before--if his problem was a genuine one
and it was he who solved it. He cannot measure and judge the outcome by
his earlier demands for the very good reason that the outcome of real
deliberation empties these earlier demands of their interest and
authority for him.

Can the conception thus suggested of personal growth through exercise of
creative or constructive intelligence be in any measure verified by a
general survey of the economic side of life? Has it any important
bearings upon any parts of economic theory? These are the questions to
which this essay is addressed.

I

Sec. 2. How have the real or fancied needs of the average person of toda