<p>The animistic habit of mind may occur in the early, undifferentiated form
of an inchoate animistic belief, or in the later and more highly
integrated phase in which there is an anthropomorphic personification of
the propensity imputed to facts. The industrial value of such a lively
animistic sense, or of such recourse to a preternatural agency or the
guidance of an unseen hand, is of course very much the same in either
case. As affects the industrial serviceability of the individual, the
effect is of the same kind in either case; but the extent to which this
habit of thought dominates or shapes the complex of his habits of thought
varies with the degree of immediacy, urgency, or exclusiveness with which
the individual habitually applies the animistic or anthropomorphic formula
in dealing with the facts of his environment. The animistic habit acts in
all cases to blur the appreciation of causal sequence; but the earlier,
less reflected, less defined animistic sense of propensity may be expected
to affect the intellectual processes of the individual in a more pervasive
way than the higher forms of anthropomorphism. Where the animistic habit
is present in the naive form, its scope and range of application are not
defined or limited. It will therefore palpably affect his thinking at
every turn of the person's life—wherever he has to do with the
material means of life. In the later, maturer development of animism,
after it has been defined through the process of anthropomorphic
elaboration, when its application has been limited in a somewhat
consistent fashion to the remote and the invisible, it comes about that an
increasing range of everyday facts are provisionally accounted for without
recourse to the preternatural agency in which a cultivated animism
expresses itself. A highly integrated, personified preternatural agency is
not a convenient means of handling the trivial occurrences of life, and a
habit is therefore easily fallen into of accounting for many trivial or
vulgar phenomena in terms of sequence. The provisional explanation so
arrived at is by neglect allowed to stand as definitive, for trivial
purposes, until special provocation or perplexity recalls the individual
to his allegiance. But when special exigencies arise, that is to say, when
there is peculiar need of a full and free recourse to the law of cause and
effect, then the individual commonly has recourse to the preternatural
agency as a universal solvent, if he is possessed of an anthropomorphic
belief.</p>
<p>The extra-causal propensity or agent has a very high utility as a recourse
in perplexity, but its utility is altogether of a non-economic kind. It is
especially a refuge and a fund of comfort where it has attained the degree
of consistency and specialization that belongs to an anthropomorphic
divinity. It has much to commend it even on other grounds than that of
affording the perplexed individual a means of escape from the difficulty
of accounting for phenomena in terms of causal sequence. It would scarcely
be in place here to dwell on the obvious and well-accepted merits of an
anthropomorphic divinity, as seen from the point of view of the aesthetic,
moral, or spiritual interest, or even as seen from the less remote
standpoint of political, military, or social policy. The question here
concerns the less picturesque and less urgent economic value of the belief
in such a preternatural agency, taken as a habit of thought which affects
the industrial serviceability of the believer. And even within this
narrow, economic range, the inquiry is perforce confined to the immediate
bearing of this habit of thought upon the believer's workmanlike
serviceability, rather than extended to include its remoter economic
effects. These remoter effects are very difficult to trace. The inquiry
into them is so encumbered with current preconceptions as to the degree in
which life is enhanced by spiritual contact with such a divinity, that any
attempt to inquire into their economic value must for the present be
fruitless.</p>
<p>The immediate, direct effect of the animistic habit of thought upon the
general frame of mind of the believer goes in the direction of lowering
his effective intelligence in the respect in which intelligence is of
especial consequence for modern industry. The effect follows, in varying
degree, whether the preternatural agent or propensity believed in is of a
higher or a lower cast. This holds true of the barbarian's and the
sporting man's sense of luck and propensity, and likewise of the somewhat
higher developed belief in an anthropomorphic divinity, such as is
commonly possessed by the same class. It must be taken to hold true also—though
with what relative degree of cogency is not easy to say—of the more
adequately developed anthropomorphic cults, such as appeal to the devout
civilized man. The industrial disability entailed by a popular adherence
to one of the higher anthropomorphic cults may be relatively slight, but
it is not to be overlooked. And even these high-class cults of the Western
culture do not represent the last dissolving phase of this human sense of
extra-causal propensity. Beyond these the same animistic sense shows
itself also in such attenuations of anthropomorphism as the
eighteenth-century appeal to an order of nature and natural rights, and in
their modern representative, the ostensibly post-Darwinian concept of a
meliorative trend in the process of evolution. This animistic explanation
of phenomena is a form of the fallacy which the logicians knew by the name
of ignava ratio. For the purposes of industry or of science it counts as a
blunder in the apprehension and valuation of facts. Apart from its direct
industrial consequences, the animistic habit has a certain significance
for economic theory on other grounds. (1) It is a fairly reliable
indication of the presence, and to some extent even of the degree of
potency, of certain other archaic traits that accompany it and that are of
substantial economic consequence; and (2) the material consequences of
that code of devout proprieties to which the animistic habit gives rise in
the development of an anthropomorphic cult are of importance both (a) as
affecting the community's consumption of goods and the prevalent canons of
taste, as already suggested in an earlier chapter, and (b) by inducing and
conserving a certain habitual recognition of the relation to a superior,
and so stiffening the current sense of status and allegiance.</p>
<p>As regards the point last named (b), that body of habits of thought which
makes up the character of any individual is in some sense an organic
whole. A marked variation in a given direction at any one point carries
with it, as its correlative, a concomitant variation in the habitual
expression of life in other directions or other groups of activities.
These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions of life, are all
phases of the single life sequence of the individual; therefore a habit
formed in response to a given stimulus will necessarily affect the
character of the response made to other stimuli. A modification of human
nature at any one point is a modification of human nature as a whole. On
this ground, and perhaps to a still greater extent on obscurer grounds
that can not be discussed here, there are these concomitant variations as
between the different traits of human nature. So, for instance, barbarian
peoples with a well-developed predatory scheme of life are commonly also
possessed of a strong prevailing animistic habit, a well-formed
anthropomorphic cult, and a lively sense of status. On the other hand,
anthropomorphism and the realizing sense of an animistic propensity in
material are less obtrusively present in the life of the peoples at the
cultural stages which precede and which follow the barbarian culture. The
sense of status is also feebler; on the whole, in peaceable communities.
It is to be remarked that a lively, but slightly specialized, animistic
belief is to be found in most if not all peoples living in the
ante-predatory, savage stage of culture. The primitive savage takes his
animism less seriously than the barbarian or the degenerate savage. With
him it eventuates in fantastic myth-making, rather than in coercive
superstition. The barbarian culture shows sportsmanship, status, and
anthropomorphism. There is commonly observable a like concomitance of
variations in the same respects in the individual temperament of men in
the civilized communities of today. Those modern representatives of the
predaceous barbarian temper that make up the sporting element are commonly
believers in luck; at least they have a strong sense of an animistic
propensity in things, by force of which they are given to gambling. So
also as regards anthropomorphism in this class. Such of them as give in
their adhesion to some creed commonly attach themselves to one of the
naively and consistently anthropomorphic creeds; there are relatively few
sporting men who seek spiritual comfort in the less anthropomorphic cults,
such as the Unitarian or the Universalist.</p>
<p>Closely bound up with this correlation of anthropomorphism and prowess is
the fact that anthropomorphic cults act to conserve, if not to initiate,
habits of mind favorable to a regime of status. As regards this point, it
is quite impossible to say where the disciplinary effect of the cult ends
and where the evidence of a concomitance of variations in inherited traits
begins. In their finest development, the predatory temperament, the sense
of status, and the anthropomorphic cult all together belong to the
barbarian culture; and something of a mutual causal relation subsists
between the three phenomena as they come into sight in communities on that
cultural level. The way in which they recur in correlation in the habits
and attitudes of individuals and classes today goes far to imply a like
causal or organic relation between the same psychological phenomena
considered as traits or habits of the individual. It has appeared at an
earlier point in the discussion that the relation of status, as a feature
of social structure, is a consequence of the predatory habit of life. As
regards its line of derivation, it is substantially an elaborated
expression of the predatory attitude. On the other hand, an
anthropomorphic cult is a code of detailed relations of status
superimposed upon the concept of a preternatural, inscrutable propensity
in material things. So that, as regards the external facts of its
derivation, the cult may be taken as an outgrowth of archaic man's
pervading animistic sense, defined and in some degree transformed by the
predatory habit of life, the result being a personified preternatural
agency, which is by imputation endowed with a full complement of the
habits of thought that characterize the man of the predatory culture.</p>
<p>The grosser psychological features in the case, which have an immediate
bearing on economic theory and are consequently to be taken account of
here, are therefore: (a) as has appeared in an earlier chapter, the
predatory, emulative habit of mind here called prowess is but the
barbarian variant of the generically human instinct of workmanship, which
has fallen into this specific form under the guidance of a habit of
invidious comparison of persons; (b) the relation of status is a formal
expression of such an invidious comparison duly gauged and graded
according to a sanctioned schedule; (c) an anthropomorphic cult, in the
days of its early vigor at least, is an institution the characteristic
element of which is a relation of status between the human subject as
inferior and the personified preternatural agency as superior. With this
in mind, there should be no difficulty in recognizing the intimate
relation which subsists between these three phenomena of human nature and
of human life; the relation amounts to an identity in some of their
substantial elements. On the one hand, the system of status and the
predatory habit of life are an expression of the instinct of workmanship
as it takes form under a custom of invidious comparison; on the other
hand, the anthropomorphic cult and the habit of devout observances are an
expression of men's animistic sense of a propensity in material things,
elaborated under the guidance of substantially the same general habit of
invidious comparison. The two categories—the emulative habit of life
and the habit of devout observances—are therefore to be taken as
complementary elements of the barbarian type of human nature and of its
modern barbarian variants. They are expressions of much the same range of
aptitudes, made in response to different sets of stimuli.</p>
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