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.
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