ation, may
seem to offer a new facility in action or some unimagined release from
labor or restriction. The adventure of marriage and parenthood, the
intimate attraction of great music, the mystery of an unknown language
or a forbidden country, the disdainful aloofness of a mountain peak
dominating a landscape are conspicuous instances inviting a more
spontaneous type of constructive interest that finds abundant expression
also in the more commonplace situations and emergencies of everyday
life. It is sheer play upon words to speak in such cases of a pleasure
of adventurousness, a pleasure of discovery, a pleasure of conquest and
mastery, assigning this as the motive in order to bring these interests
to the type that fits addiction to one's particular old coat or
easy-chair. The specific "pleasure" alleged could not exist were the
tendency not active beforehand. While the same is true in a sense for
habitual concrete pleasures in relation to their corresponding habits,
the irreducible difference in constructive interest as a type lies in
the _transition_ which this type of interest purposes and effects from
one level of concrete or substantive desire and pleasure to another.
Here one consciously looks to a result that he cannot foresee or
foretell; in the other type his interest as interest goes straight to
its mark, sustained by a confident forecast.[51]

Sec. 10. But constructive interests, whether provoked by suggestion or of
the more freely imaginative type, may, as has been said, be held to lie
outside the scope of economic theory. How a desire for a certain thing
has come to get expression may seem quite immaterial--economically
speaking. Economics has no concern with human folly as such or human
imitativeness, or human aspiration high or low or any other of the
multitude of motives that have to do with secular changes in the
"standard of living" and in the ideals of life at large. It has no
concern with anything that lies behind the fact that I am in the market
with my mind made up to buy or sell a thing at a certain price. And the
answer to this contention must be that it first reverses and then
distorts the true perspective of our economic experience. Let it be
admitted freely--indeed, let it be insisted on--that the definition of a
science must be determined by the pragmatic test. If an economist elects
to concern himself with the problems of what has been called the "loose
mechanics of trade" there can be no