Thorstein Veblen：The Theory of the Leisure Class, Excerpt 8

Under the guidance of this naive discrimination between the inert and the animate, the activities of the primitive social group tend to fall into two classes, which would in modern phrase be called exploit and industry. Industry is effort that goes to create a new thing, with a new purpose given it by the fashioning hand of its maker out of passive ("brute") material; while exploit, so far as it results in an outcome useful to the agent, is the conversion to his own ends of energies previously directed to some other end by an other agent. We still speak of "brute matter" with something of the barbarian's realisation of a profound significance in the term.

Source： https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/833
Locator：Excerpt 8 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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