Yet his dismissal of the «common apprehension» that active powers play a role «in our complex
ideas of natural substance» as they do in voluntary action «they being not, perhaps, so truly active powers as our hasty thoughts are apt to represent them,» is conspicuously hesitant, For what is the force (that is to say, the weakness) of «perhaps»?
In 1937, advocates
of technocracy believed that scarcity had been abolished, thereby making economics redundant, whereas the basis for technocracies in 2013 is the
idea that in spite
of almost another century
of economic, industrial and scientific development, scarcity, either in the form
of substance, i.e. resources, or as
natural processes such as the sequestration
of atmospheric CO2, persists.