The faculty of a
ready apprehension and unbiased appreciation of causes in his
environment grows in relative economic importance and any element
in the complex of his habits of thought which intrudes a bias at
variance with this ready appreciation of matter-of-fact sequence
gains proportionately in importance as a disturbing element
acting to lower his industrial usefulness. Through its cumulative
effect upon the habitual attitude of the population, even a
slight or inconspicuous bias towards accounting for everyday
facts by recourse to other ground than that of quantitative
causation may work an appreciable lowering of the collective
industrial efficiency of a community.
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.
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