All instinctive behaviour is subject to development and hence to modification by habit.17 Such impulsive action as is in no degree intelligent, and so suffers no adaptation through habitual use, is not properly to be called instinctive; it is rather to be classed as tropismatic. In human conduct the effects of habit in this respect are particularly far-reaching. In man the instincts appoint less of a determinate sequence of action, and so leave a more open field for adaptation of behaviour to the circumstances of the case. When instinct enjoins little else than the end of endeavour, leaving the sequence of acts by which this end is to be approached somewhat a matter of open alternatives, the share of reflection, discretion and deliberate adaptation will be correspondingly large. The range and diversity of habituation is also correspondingly enlarged.

In man, too, by the same fact, habit takes on more of a cumulative character, in that the habitual acquirements of the race are handed on from one generation to the next, by tradition, training, education, or whatever general term may best designate that discipline of habituation by which the young acquire what the old have learned. By similar means the like elements of habitual conduct are carried over from one community or one culture to another, leading to further complications. Cumulatively, therefore, habit creates usages, customs, conventions, preconceptions, composite principles of conduct that run back only indirectly to the native predispositions of the race, but that may affect the working-out of any given line of endeavour in much the same way as if these habitual elements were of the nature of a native bias.

Along with this body of derivative standards and canons of conduct, and handed on by the same discipline of habituation, goes a cumulative body of knowledge, made up in part of matter-of-fact acquaintance with phenomena and in greater part of conventional wisdom embodying certain acquired predilections and preconceptions current in the community. Workmanship proceeds on the accumulated knowledge so received and current, and turns it to account in dealing with the material means of life. Whatever passes current in this way as knowledge of facts is turned to account as far as may be, and so it is worked into a customary scheme of ways and means, a system of technology, into which new elements of information or acquaintance with the nature and use of things are incorporated, assimilated as they come.

The scheme of technology so worked out and carried along in the routine of getting a living will be serviceable for current use and have a substantial value for a further advance in technological efficiency somewhat in proportion as the knowledge so embodied in technological practice is effectually of the nature of matter-of-fact. Much of the information derived from experience in industry is likely to be of this matter-of-fact nature; but much of the knowledge made use of for the technological purpose is also of the nature of convention, inference and authentic opinion, arrived at on quite other grounds than workmanlike experience. This alien body of information, or pseudo-information, goes into the grand total of human knowledge quite as freely as any matter of fact, and it is therefore also necessarily taken up and assimilated in that technological equipment of knowledge and proficiency by use of which the work in hand is to be done.

But the experience which yields this useful and pseudo-useful knowledge is got under the impulsion and guidance of one and another of the instincts with which man is endowed, and takes the shape and color given it by the instinctive bias in whose service it is acquired. At the same time, whatever its derivation, the knowledge acquired goes into the aggregate of information drawn on for the ways and means of workmanship. Therefore the habits formed in any line of experience, under the guidance of any given instinctive disposition, will have their effect on the conduct and aims of the workman in all his work and play; so that progress in technological matters is by no means an outcome of the sense of workmanship alone.

It follows that in all their working the human instincts are in this way incessantly subject to mutual “contamination,” whereby the working of any one is incidentally affected by the bias and proclivities inherent in all the rest; and in so far as these current habits and customs in this way come to reënforce the predispositions comprised under any one instinct or any given group of instincts, the bias so accentuated comes to pervade the habits of thought of all the members of the community and gives a corresponding obliquity to the technological groundwork of the community. So, for instance, addiction to magical, superstitious or religious conceptions will necessarily have its effect on the conceptions and logic employed in technological theory and practice, and will impair its efficiency by that much. A people much given to punctilios of rank and respect of persons will in some degree carry these habitual predilections over into the field of workmanship and will allow considerations of authenticity, of personal weight and consequence, to decide questions of technological expediency; so that ideas which have none but a putative efficiency may in this way come in for a large share in the state of the industrial arts. A people whose culture has for any reason taken on a pronounced coercive (predatory) character, with rigorous class distinctions, an arbitrary governmental control, formidable gods and an authoritative priesthood, will have its industrial organisation and its industrial arts fashioned to meet the demands and the logic of these institutions. Such an institutional situation exerts a great and pervasive constraint on the technological scheme in which workmanship takes effect under its rule, both directly by prescribing the things to do and the time, place and circumstance of doing them, and indirectly through the habits of thought induced in the working population living under its rule. Innovation, the utilisation of newly acquired technological insight, is greatly hindered by such institutional requirements that are enforced by other impulses than the sense of workmanship.

In the known lower cultures such institutional complications as might be expected greatly to hinder or deflect the sense of workmanship are commonly neither large, rigorous nor obvious. Something of the kind there apparently always is, in the way, for instance, of the customary prerogatives and perquisites of the older men, as well as their tutelary oversight of the younger generation and of the common interests of the group.18 When this rule of seniority is elaborated into such set forms as the men’s (secret) societies, with exacting initiatory ceremonies and class tabus,19 its effect on workday life is often very considerable, even though the community may show little that can fairly be classed as autocracy, chieftainship, or even aristocratic government. In many or all of these naïve and early developments of authority, and perhaps especially in those cultures where the control takes this inchoate form of a customary “gerontocracy,”20 its immediate effect is that an abiding sense of authenticity comes to pervade the routine of daily life, such as effectually to obstruct all innovation, whether in the ways and means of work or in the conduct of life more at large. Control by a gerontocracy appears to reach its best development and to run with the fullest consistency and effect in communities where an appreciable degree of predatory exploit is habitual, and the inference is ready, and at least plausible, that this institution is substantially of a predatory origin, that the principles (habits of thought) on which it rests are an outgrowth of pugnacity, self-aggrandisement and fear. Under favouring conditions of friction and jealousy between groups these propensities will settle into institutional habits of authority and deference, and so long as the resultant exercise of control is vested by custom in the class of elders the direct consequence is a marked abatement of initiative throughout the community and a consequent appearance of conservatism and stagnation in its technological scheme as well as in the customary usages under whose guidance the community lives.21 So these instinctive propensities which have no primary significance in the way of workmanship may come to count very materially in shaping the group’s technological equipment of ideas and in deflecting the sense of workmanship from the naïve pursuit of material efficiency.

The rule of the elders appears to have been extremely prevalent in the earlier phases of culture. So much so that it may even be set down as the most characteristic trait of the upper savagery and of the lower barbarism; whether it takes the elaborately institutionalised form of a settled gerontocracy, as among the Australian blacks, with sharply defined class divisions and perquisites and a consistent subjection of women and children; or the looser customary rule of the Elders, with a degree of deference and circumspection on the part of the younger generation and an uncertain conventional inferiority of women and children, as seen among the pagans of the Malay peninsula,22 the Eskimo of the Arctic seaboard,23 the Mincopies of the Andamans,24 or, on a somewhat higher level, the Pueblo Indians of the American South-west.25 Illustrative instances of such an inchoate organisation of authority are very widely distributed, but the communities that follow such a naïve scheme of life are commonly neither large, powerful, wealthy, nor much in the public eye. The presumption is that the sense of authenticity which pervades these and similar cultures, amounting to a degree of tabu on innovation, has had much to do with the notably slow advance of technology among savage peoples. Such appears presumably to have been the prevalent run of the facts throughout the stone age in all quarters of the Earth.

It is not altogether plain just what are the innate predispositions chiefly involved in this primitive social control which at its untroubled best develops into a “gerontocracy.” There can apparently be little question but that its prime motive force is the parental bent, expressing itself in a naïve impulsive surveillance of the common interests of the group and a tutelage of the incoming generation. But here as in other social relations the self-regarding sentiments unavoidably come into play; so that (a) the tutelage of the elders takes something of an authoritative tone and blends self-aggrandisement with their quasi-parental solicitude, giving an institutional outcome which makes the young generation subservient to the elders, ostensibly for the mutual and collective good of both parties to the relation; (b) if predatory or warlike exploit in any degree becomes habitual to the community the sentiment of self-aggrandisement gets the upper hand, and subservience to the able-bodied elders becomes the dominant note in this relation of tutelage, and their parental interest in the welfare of the incoming generation in a corresponding degree goes into abeyance under the pressure of the appropriate sentiments of pugnacity and self-seeking, giving rise to a coercive régime of a more or less ruthless character; (c) correlatively, along with unwearying insistence on their own prerogatives and collective discretion, on the part of the elders, there goes, on the part of the community at large, a correspondingly habitual acceptance of their findings and the precedents they have established, resulting in a universal addiction to the broad principles of unmitigated authenticity, with no power anywhere capable of breaking across the accumulated precedents and tabus. Even the ruling class of elders, being an unwieldy deliberative body or executive committee, is held by parliamentary inertia, as well as by a circumspect regard for their prescriptive rights, to a due observance of the customary law. The force of precedent is notoriously strong on the lower levels of culture. Under the rule of the elders deference to precedent grows into an inveterate habit in the young, and when presently these come to take their turn as discretionary elders the habit of deference to the precedents established by those who have gone before still binds them, and the life and thought of the community never escape the dead hand of the parent.

When worked out into an institution of control in this way, and crossed with the other instinctive propensities that go to make governmental authority, it is apparently unavoidable that the parental bent should suffer this curious inversion. In the simplest and unsophisticated terms, its functional content appears to be an unselfish solicitude for the well-being of the incoming generation—a bias for the highest efficiency and fullest volume of life in the group, with a particular drift to the future; so that, under its rule, contrary to the dictum of the economic theorists, future goods are preferred to present goods26 and the filial generation is given the preference over the parental generation in all that touches their material welfare. But where the self-regarding sentiments, self-complacency and self-abasement, come largely into play, as they are bound to do in any culture that partakes appreciably of a predatory or coercive character, the prerogatives of the ruling class and the principles of authentic usage become canons of truth and right living and presently take precedence of workmanlike efficiency and the fulness of life of the group. It results that conventional tests of validity presently accumulate and increasingly deflect and obstruct the naïve pursuit of workmanlike efficiency, in large part by obscuring those matters of fact that lend themselves to technological insight.

But like other innate predispositions the parental bent continually reasserts itself in its native and untaught character, as an ever resilient solicitude for the welfare of the young and the prospective fortunes of the group. As such it constantly comes in to reënforce the instinct of workmanship and sustain interest in the direct pursuit of efficiency in the ways and means of life. So closely in touch and so concurrent are the parental bent and the sense of workmanship in this quest of efficiency that it is commonly difficult to guess which of the two proclivities is to be credited with the larger or the leading part in any given line of conduct; although taken by and large the two are after all fairly distinct in respect of their functional content. This thorough and far-going concurrence of the two may perhaps be taken to mean that the instinct of workmanship is in the main a propensity to work out the ends which the parental bent makes worth while.

It seems to be these two predispositions in conjunction that have exercised the largest and most consistent control over that growth of custom and conventional principles that has standardised the life of mankind in society and so given rise to a system of institutions. This control bears selectively on the whole range of institutions created by habitual response to the call of the other instincts and has the effect of a “common-sense” surveillance which prevents the scheme of life from running into an insufferable tangle of grotesque extravagances. That their surveillance has not always been decisive need scarcely be specifically called to mind; human culture in all ages presents too many imbecile usages and principles of conduct to let anyone overlook the fact that disserviceable institutions easily arise and continue to hold their place in spite of the disapproval of native common sense. The selective control exercised over custom and usage by these instincts of serviceability is neither too close nor too insistent. Wide, even extravagant, departures from the simple dictates of this native common sense occur even within the narrow range of the domestic and minor civil institutions, where these two common-sense predispositions should concur to create a prescriptive usage looking directly to the continuation and welfare of the race. Considerations, or perhaps rather conventional preconceptions, running on other grounds, as, for instance, on grounds of superstition or religion, of propriety and gentility, of pecuniary or political expediency, have come in for a large share in ordering the institutions of family and neighbourhood life. Yet doubtless it is the parental bent and the sense of workmanship in concurrence that have been the primary and persistent factors in (selectively) shaping the household organisation among all peoples, however great may have been the force of other factors, instinctive and habitual, that have gone to diversify the variegated outcome.

It appears, then, that so long as the parental solicitude and the sense of workmanship do not lead men to take thought and correct the otherwise unguarded drift of things, the growth of institutions—usage, customs, canons of conduct, principles of right and propriety, the course of cumulative habituation as it goes forward under the driving force of the several instincts native to man,—will commonly run at cross purposes with serviceability and the sense of workmanship.27

That such should be the case lies in the nature of things, as will readily appear on reflection. Under given circumstances and under the impulsion of a given instinctive propensity a given line of behaviour becomes habitual and so is installed by use and wont as a principle of conduct. The principle or canon of conduct so gained takes its place among the habitual verities of life in the community and is handed on by tradition. Under further impulsion of the same and other instinctive propensities, and under altered circumstances, conduct in other, unrelated lines will be referred to this received principle as a bench-mark by which its goodness is appraised and to which all conduct is accommodated, giving a result which is related to the exigencies of the case only at the second remove and by channels of habit which have only a conventional relevancy to the case. The farther this manner of crossing and grafting of habitual elements proceeds in the elaboration of principles and usage, the larger will be the mass and the graver will be the complication of materially irrelevant considerations present in any given line of conduct, the more extensive and fantastic will be the fabric of conventionalities which come to condition the response to any one of the innate human propensities, and the more “irrelevant, incompetent and impertinent” will be the line of conduct prescribed by use and wont. Except by recourse to the sense of workmanship there is no evading this complication of ineptitudes and irrelevancies, and such recourse is not easily had. For the bias of settled habit goes to sustain the institutional fabric of received sophistications, and these sophistications are bound in such a network of give and take that a disturbance of the fabric at any point will involve more or less of a derangement throughout.

This body of habitual principles and preconceptions is at the same time the medium through which experience receives those elements of information and insight on which workmanship is able to draw in contriving ways and means and turning them to account for the uses of life. And the conventional verities count in this connexion almost wholly as obstructions to workmanlike efficiency. Worldly wisdom, insight into the proprieties and expediencies of human intercourse, the scheme of tabus, consanguinities, and magical efficacies, yields very little that can effectually be turned to account for technological ends. The experience gained by habituation under the stress of these other proclivities and their derivative principles is necessarily made use of in workmanship, and so enters into the texture of the technological system, but a large part of it is of very doubtful value for the purpose. Much of this experience runs at cross purposes with workmanship, not only in that the putative information which this experience brings home to men has none but a putative serviceability, but also in that the habit of mind induced by its discipline obscures that insight into matter of fact that is indispensable to workmanlike efficiency.

But the most obstructive derangement that besets workmanship is what may be called the self-contamination of the sense of workmanship itself. This applies in a peculiar degree to the earlier or more elementary phases of culture, but it holds true only with lessening force throughout the later growth of civilisation. The hindrance to technological efficiency from this source will often rise to large proportions even in advanced communities, particularly where magical, religious or other anthropomorphic habits of thought are prevalent. The difficulty has been spoken of as anthropomorphism, or animism,—which is only a more archaic anthropomorphism. The essential trait of anthropomorphic conceptions, so far as bears on the present argument, is that conduct, more or less fully after the human fashion of conduct, is imputed to external objects; whether these external objects are facts of observation or creatures of mythological fancy. Such anthropomorphism commonly means an interpretation of phenomena in terms of workmanship, though it may also involve much more than this, particularly in the higher reaches of myth-making. But the simpler anthropomorphic or animistic beliefs that pervade men’s every-day thinking commonly amount to little if anything more than the naïve imputation of a workmanlike propensity in the observed facts. External objects are believed to do things; or rather it is believed that they are seen to do things.

The reason of this imputation of conduct to external things is simple, obvious, and intimate in all men’s apprehension; so much so, indeed, as not readily to permit its being seen in perspective and appreciated at anything like its effectual force. All facts of observation are necessarily seen in the light of the observer’s habits of thought, and the most intimate and inveterate of his habits of thought is the experience of his own initiative and endeavours. It is to this “apperception mass” that objects of apperception are finally referred, and it is in terms of this experience that their measure is finally taken. No psychological phenomenon is more familiar than this ubiquitous “personal equation” in men’s apprehension of whatever facts come within their observation.

The sense of workmanship is like all human instincts in the respect that when the occasion offers, the agent moved by its impulse not only runs through a sequence of actions suitable to the instinctive end, but he is also given to dwelling, more or less sentimentally, on the objects and activities about which his attention is engaged by the promptings of this instinctive propensity. In so far as he is moved by the instinct of workmanship man contemplates the objects with which he comes in contact from the point of view of their relevancy to ulterior results, their aptitude for taking effect in a consequential outcome. Habitual occupation with workmanlike conceptions,—and in the lower cultures all men and women are habitually so occupied, since there is no considerable class or season not engaged in the quest of a livelihood,—this occupation with workmanlike interests, leaving the attention alert in the direction towards workmanlike phenomena, carries with it habitual thinking in the terms in which the logic of workmanship runs. The facts of observation are conceived as facts of workmanship, and the logic of workmanship becomes the logic of events. Their apprehension in these terms is easy, since it draws into action the faculties of apperception and reflection that are already alert and facile through habitual use, and it assimilates the facts in an apperceptive system of relationships that is likewise ready and satisfactory, convincing through habitual service and by native proclivity to this line of systematisation. By instinct and habit observed phenomena are apprehended from this (teleological) point of view, and they are construed, by way of systematisation, in terms of such an instinctive pursuit of some workmanlike end. In latterday psychological jargon, human knowledge is of a “pragmatic” character.

As all men habitually act under the guidance of instincts, and therefore by force of sentiment instinctively look to some end in all activity, so the objects with which the primitive workman has to do are also conceived as acting under impulse of an instinctive kind; and a bent, a teleological or pragmatic nature, is in some degree imputed to them and comes as a matter of course to be accepted as a constituent element in their apprehended make-up. A putative pragmatic bent innate in external things comes in this way to pass current as observed matter of fact. By force of the sense of workmanship external objects are in great part apperceived in respect of what they will do; and their most substantial characteristic therefore, their intimate individual nature, in so far as they are conceived as individual entities, is that they will do things.

In the workmanlike apprehension of them the nature of things is twofold: (a) what can be done with them as raw material for use under the creative hand of the workman who makes things, and (b) what they will do as entities acting in their own right and working out their own ends. The former is matter of fact, the latter matter of imputation; but both alike, and in the naïve apprehension of uncritical men both equally, are facts of observation and elements of objective knowledge. The two are, of course, of very unequal value for the purposes of workmanship. It should seem, at least on first contact with the distinction, that the former category alone can have effectually conduced or contributed to workmanlike efficiency, and so it should be the only substantial factor in the growth of technological insight and proficiency: while the latter category of knowledge should presumably have always been an unmitigated hindrance to effective work and to technological advance. But such does not appear on closer scrutiny to have been the case in the past: whether such sheer discrimination against the technological serviceability of all these putative facts would hold good in latterday civilisation is a question which may perhaps best be left to the parties in interest in “pragmatic” and theological controversy.

These two categories of knowledge, or of cognoscenda, are incongruous, of course, and they seem incompatible when applied to the same phenomena, the same external objects. But such incongruity does not disturb anyone who is at all content to take facts at their face value,—for both ways of apprehending the facts are equally given in the face value of the facts apprehended. And on the known lower levels of culture it appears that in the workman’s apprehension of the facts with which he has to do there is no evident strain due to this twofold nature and twofold interpretation of the objects of knowledge. So, for instance, the Pueblo potter (woman) may (putatively) be aware of certain inherent, quasi-spiritual, pragmatic qualities, claims and proclivities personal to the clay beds from which her raw material is drawn: different clay beds have, no doubt, a somewhat different quasi-personality, which has, among other things, to do with the goodness of the raw material they afford. Even the clay in hand will have its pragmatic peculiarities and idiosyncracies which are duly to be respected; and, notably, the finished pot is an entity with a life-history of its own and with temperament, fortunes and fatalities that make up the substance of good and evil in its world.28 But all that does not perceptibly affect the technology of the Pueblo potter’s art, beyond carrying a sequence of ceremonial observance that may run along by the side of the technological process; nor does it manifestly affect the workmanlike use of the pot during its lifetime, except that the pragmatic nature of the given pot will decide, on grounds of ceremonial competency, to what use it may be put.29 Matter of fact and matter of imputation run along side by side in inextricable contact but with slight apparent mutual interference across the line. The potter digs her clay as best she has learned how, and it is a matter of workmanlike efficiency, in which empirical knowledge of the mechanical qualities of the material is very efficiently combined with the potter’s trained proficiency in the discretionary use of her tools; the tools, of course, also have their (putative) temperamental idiosyncracies, but they are employed in her hands in uncritical conformity with such matter-of-fact laws of physics as she has learned. The clay is washed, kneaded and tempered with the same circumspect regard to the opaque facts known about clay through long handling of it. What and how much tempering material may best be used, and how it is to be worked in, may all have a recondite explanation in the subtler imputed traits of the clay; a certain clay may have a putative quasi-spiritual affinity for certain tempering material; but the work of selection and mixing is carried out with a watchful regard to the mechanical character of the materials and without doubt that the given materials will respond in definite, empirically ascertained ways to the pressure brought on them by the potter’s hands, and without questioning the matter of fact that such and so much of manipulation will mix such and so much of tempering material with the given lot of clay. The clay is “as wax in her hands;” what comes of it is the product of her insight and proficiency. Still the pragmatic nature of all these materials viewed as distinct entities is never to be denied, and in those respects in which she does not creatively design, manipulate and construct the work of her hands, its putative self-sufficiency of existence, meaning and propensity goes on its own recognisances unshorn and inalienable.

Technological efficiency rests on matter-of-fact knowledge, as contrasted with knowledge of the traits imputed to external objects in making acquaintance with them. Therefore every substantial advance in technological mastery necessarily adds something to this body of opaque fact, and with every such advance proportionably less of the behaviour of inanimate things will come to be construed in terms of an imputed workmanlike or teleological bent. At the same time the imputation of a teleological meaning or workmanlike bent to the external facts that are made use of is likely to take a more circumspect, ingenious and idealised form. Under the circumstances that condition an increasing technological mastery there is an ever-growing necessity to avoid conflict between the imputed traits of external objects and those facts of their behaviour that are constantly in evidence in their technological use. In so far, therefore, as a simple and immediate imputation of workmanlike self-direction is seen manifestly to traverse the facts of daily use its place will be supplied by more shadowy anthropomorphic agencies that are assumed to carry on their life and work in some degree of detachment from the material objects in question, and to these anthropomorphic agencies which so lie obscurely in the background of the observed facts will be assigned a larger and larger share of the required initiative and self-direction. For so alien to mankind, with its instinctive sense of workmanship, is the mutilation of brute creation into mere opaque matter-of-fact, and so indefeasibly does the “consciousness of kind” assert itself, that each successive renunciation of such an imputed bias of workmanship in concrete objects is sought to be redeemed by pushing the imputation farther into the background of observed phenomena and running their putative workmanlike bias in more consummately anthropomorphic terms. So an animistic conception30 of things comes presently to supplement, and in part supplant, the more naïve and immediate imputation of workmanship, leading up to farther and more elaborate myth-making; until in the course of elaboration and refinement there may emerge a monotheistic and providential Creator seated in an infinitely remote but ubiquitous space of four dimensions.

This imputation of bias and initiative has doubtless lost ground among civilised communities, as contrasted with the matter-of-fact apprehension of things, so that where it once was the main body of knowledge it now is believed to live and move only within that margin of things not yet overtaken by matter-of-fact information,—at least so it is held in the vainglorious scepticism of the Western culture. Meantime it is to be noted that the proclivity to impute a workmanlike bias to external facts has not been lost, nor has it become inoperative even among the adepts of Occidental scepticism. On the one hand it still enables the modern scientist to generalise his observations in terms of causation,31 and on the other hand it has preserved the life of God the Father unto this day. It is as the creative workman, the Great Artificer, that he has taken his last stand against the powers of spiritual twilight.

Out of the simpler workday familiarity with the raw materials and processes employed in industry, in the lower cultures, there emerges no system of knowledge avowed as such; although in all known instances of such lower cultures the industrial arts have taken on a systematic character, such as often to give rise to definite, extensive and elaborate technological processes as well as to manual and other technological training; both of which will necessarily involve something like an elementary theory of mechanics systematised on grounds of matter-of-fact, as well as a practical routine of empirical ways and means. In the lower cultures the growth of this body of opaque facts and of its systematic coherence is simply the habitual growth of technological procedure. Considered as a knowledge of things it is prosy and unattractive; it does not greatly appeal to men’s curiosity, being scarcely interesting in itself, but only for the use to be made of it. Its facts are not lighted up with that spiritual fire of pragmatic initiative and propensity which animates the same phenomena when seen in the light of an imputed workmanlike behaviour and so construed in terms of conduct. On the other hand, when the phenomena are interpreted anthropomorphically they are indued with a “human interest,” such as will draw the attention of all men in all ages, as witness the worldwide penchant for myth-making.

Such animistic imputation of end and endeavour to the facts of observation will in no case cover the whole of men’s apprehension of the facts. It is a matter of imputation, not of direct observation; and there is always a fringe of opaque matter-of-fact bound up with even the most animistically conceived object. Such is unavoidably the case. The animistic conception imputes to its subject a workmanlike propensity to do things, and such an imputation necessarily implies that, as agent, the object in question engages in something like a technological process, a workmanlike manipulation wherein he has his will with the raw materials upon which his workmanlike force and proficiency spends itself. Workmanship involves raw material, and in the respect in which this raw material is passively shaped to his purposes by the workman’s manipulation it is not conceived to be actively seeking its own ends on its own initiative. So that by force of the logic of workmanship the imputation of a workmanlike (animistic) propensity to brute facts, itself involves the assumption of crude inanimate matter as a correlate of the putative workmanlike agent. The anthropomorphic fancy of the primitive workman, therefore, can never carry the teleological interpretation of phenomena to such a finality but that there will always in his apprehension be an inert residue of matter-of-fact left over. The material facts never cease to be, within reasonable limits, raw material; though the limits may be somewhat vague and shifting. And this residue of crude matter-of-fact grows and gathers consistency with experience and always remains ready to the hand of the workman for what it is worth, unmagnified and unbeautified by anthropomorphic interpretation.

The animistic, or better the anthropomorphic, elements so comprised by imputation in the common-sense apprehension of things will pass in the main for facts of observation. With the current of time and experience this may under favourable conditions grow into a developed animistic system and come to the dignity of myth, and ultimately of theology. But as it plays its part in the cruder uses of technology its common and most obstructive form is the inchoate animism or anthropomorphic bias spoken of above. In its bearing on technological efficiency, it commonly vitiates the available facts in a greater or less degree. Matter-of-fact knowledge alone will serve the uses of workmanship, since workmanship is effective only in so far as its outcome is matter-of-fact work. Any higher and more subtle potencies found in or imputed to the facts about which the artificer is engaged can only serve to divert and defeat his efforts, in that they lead him into methods and expedients that have only a putative effect.

This obstructive force of the anthropomorphic interpretation of phenomena is by no means the same in all lines of activity. The difficulty, at least in the earlier days, seems to be greatest along those lines of craft where the workman has to do with the mechanical, inanimate forces—the simplest in point of brute concreteness and the least amenable to a consistent interpretation in animistic terms. While man is conventionally distinguished from brute creation as a “tool-using animal,” his early progress in the devising and use of efficient tools, taking the word in its native sense, seems to have gone forward very slowly, both absolutely and as contrasted with those lines of workmanship in which he could carry his point by manual dexterity unaided by cunningly devised implements and mechanical contrivances;32 and still more striking is the contrast between the incredibly slow and blindfold advance of the savage culture shown in the sequence of those typical stone implements which serve conventionally as land-marks of the early technology, on the one hand, and the concomitant achievements of the same stone-age peoples in the domestication and use of plants and animals on the other hand.

No man can offer a confident conjecture as to how long a time and what a volume of experience was taken up in the growth of technological insight and proficiency up to the point when the neolithic period begins in European prehistory. In point of duration it has been found convenient to count it up roughly in units of geologic time, where a thousand years are as a day. Attempts to reduce it to such units as centuries or millennia have hitherto not come to anything appreciable. In the present state of information on this head it is doubtless a safe conjecture that the interval between the beginning of the human era and the close of palæolithic time, say in Europe or within the cultural sequence in which Europe belongs, is to be taken as some multiple of the interval that has elapsed from the beginning of the neolithic culture in Europe to the present;33 and the neolithic period itself was in its turn no doubt of longer duration than the history of Europe since the bronze first came in.34

The series of stone implements recovered from palæolithic deposits show the utmost reach of palæolithic technology on its mechanical side, in the way of workmanlike mastery of brute matter simply; for these implements are the tools of the tool-makers of that technological era. They indicate the ultimate terms of the technological situation on the mechanical side, for the craftsman working in more perishable materials could go no farther than these primary elements of the technological equipment would carry him.

The strict limitation imposed on the technology of any culture, on its mechanical side, by the “state of the industrial arts” in respect of the primary tools and materials available, whether availability is a question of knowledge or of material environment, is illustrated, for instance, by the case of the Eskimo, the North-west Coast Indians, or some of the islands of the South Sea. In each of these cultures, perhaps especially in that of the Eskimo, technological mastery had been carried as far as the circumstances of the case would permit, and in each case the decisive circumstances that limit the scope and range of workmanship are the character of the primary tools of the tool-maker and the limits of his knowledge of the mechanical properties of the materials at his disposal for such use. The Eskimo culture, for instance, is complete after its kind, worked out to the last degree of workmanlike mastery possible with the Eskimo’s knowledge of those materials on which he depended for his primary tools and on which he was able to draw for the raw materials of his industry. At the same time the Eskimo shows how considerable a superstructure of the secondary mechanic arts may be erected on a scant groundwork of the primary mechanical resources.35

In the light of such a familiar instance as the Eskimo or the Polynesian culture it is evident that very much must be allowed, in the case, e. g., of the European stone age, for work in perishable materials that have disappeared; but after all allowance of this kind, the showing for palæolithic man is not remarkable, considering the ample time allowed him, and considering also that, in Europe at least, he was by native gift nowise inferior to some of the racial elements that still survive in the existing population and that are not notoriously ill furnished either in the physical or the intellectual respect. And what is true of palæolithic times as regards the native character of this population is true in a more pronounced degree for later prehistoric times.36

The very moderate pace of the technological advance in early times in the mechanic arts stands out more strikingly when it is contrasted with what was accomplished in those arts, or rather in those occupations, that have to do immediately with living matter. Some of the crop plants, for instance, and presently some of the domestic animals, make their appearance in Denmark late in the period of the kitchen middens; which falls in the early stone age of the Danish chronology, that is to say in the early part of the neolithic period as counted in terms of the European chronology at large. These, then, are improved breeds of plants and animals, very appreciably different from their wild ancestors, arguing not only a shrewd insight and consistent management in the breeding of these domesticated races but also a long continued and intelligent use of these items of technological equipment, during which the nature and uses of the plants and animals taken into domestication must have been sufficiently understood and taken advantage of, at the same time that a workmanlike selection and propagation of favourable variations was carried out. Some slight reflection on what is implied in the successful maintenance, use and improvement of several races of crop plants and domestic animals will throw that side of the material achievements of the kitchen-midden peoples into sufficiently high contrast with their chipped flint implements and the degree of mechanical insight and proficiency which these implements indicate.

To this Danish illustrative case it may of course be objected, and with some apparent reason, that these plants and animals which begin to come in evidence in a state of domestication in the kitchen middens, and which presently afforded the chief means of life to the later stone-age population, were introduced in a domestic state from outside; and that this technological gain was the product of another and higher culture than that into which they were thus intruded. The objection will have what force it may; the facts are no doubt substantially as set forth. However, the domestication and use of these races of plants and animals embodied no less considerable a workmanlike mastery of its technological problem wherever it was worked out, whether in Denmark—as is at least highly improbable—or in Turkestan, as may well have been the case. And the successful introduction of tillage and cattle-breeding among the kitchen-midden peoples from a higher culture, without the concomitant introduction of a corresponding gain in the mechanic arts from the same source, leaves the force of the argument about as it would be in the absence of this objection. The comparative difficulty of acquiring the mechanic arts, as compared with the arts of husbandry, would appear in much the same light whether it were shown in the relatively slow acquirement of these arts through a home growth of technological mastery or in the relatively tardy and inept borrowing of them from outside. So far as bears on the present question, much the same habits of mind take effect in the acquirement of such a technological gain whether it takes place by home growth or by borrowing from without. In either case the point is that the peoples of the kitchen-middens appear to have been less able to learn the use of serviceable mechanical expedients than to acquire the technology of tillage and cattle-breeding. The appearance of tillage and cattle-breeding (“mixed farming”) at this period of Danish prehistory, without the concomitant appearance of anything like a similar technological gain in the mechanic arts, argues either (a) that in the culture from which husbandry was ultimately borrowed and in which the domestication was achieved there was no similarly substantial gain made in the mechanic arts at the same time, so that this culture from which the crop plants and animals originally came into the North of Europe had no corresponding mechanical gain to offer along with husbandry; or (b) that the kitchen-midden peoples, and the other peoples through whose hands the arts of husbandry passed on their way to the North, were unable to profit in a like degree by what was offered them in the primary mechanic arts. The known evidence seems to say that the visible retardation in the mechanic arts, as compared with husbandry, in prehistoric Denmark was due partly to the one, partly to the other of these difficulties.

To avoid confusion and misconception it may be pertinent to recall that, taken absolutely, the rate and magnitude of advance in the primary mechanic arts in Denmark at this time was very considerable; so much so indeed that the visible absolute gain in this respect has so profoundly touched the imagination of the students of that culture as to let them overlook the disparity, in point of the rate of gain, between the mechanic arts and husbandry. In the same connection it is also to be remarked that the entire neolithic culture of the kitchen-middens, as well as their husbandry, was introduced from outside of Europe, having been worked out in its early rudiments before the kitchen-midden peoples reached the Baltic seaboard. At the same time the raw materials for the mechanic arts of the neolithic culture were available to the kitchen-midden technologist in abundant quantity and unsurpassed quality; while the raw material of husbandry, the crop plants and domestic animals, were exotics. Further, in point of race, and therefore presumably in point of native endowment, the peoples of the Baltic seaboard at that time were substantially the same mixture of stocks that has in modern times carried the technology of the mechanic arts in western Europe and its colonies to a pitch of mastery never approached before or elsewhere. And the retardation in the mechanic arts as contrasted with husbandry is no greater, probably less, in neolithic Denmark than in any other culture on the same general level of efficiency.

Wherever the move may have been made, in one or in several places, and whatever may have been the particular circumstances attending the domestication and early use of crop plants and animals, the case sums up to about the same result. Through long ages of work and play men (perhaps primarily women) learned the difficult and delicate crafts of husbandry and carried their mastery of these pursuits to such a degree of proficiency, and followed out the lead given by these callings with such effect, that by the (geologic) date of early neolithic times in Europe virtually all the species of domesticable animals in three continents had been brought in and had been bred into improved races.37 At the same time the leading crop plants of the old world, those on whose yield the life of the Western peoples depends today, had been brought under cultivation, improved and specialised with such effect that all the advance that has been made in these respects since the early neolithic period is greatly less than what had been accomplished up to that time. By early neolithic times as counted in West Europe, or by the early bronze age as counted in western Asia, the leading domestic animals had been distributed, in domesticated and improved breeds, throughout central and western Asia and the inhabited regions of Europe and North Africa. The like is true for the main crop plants that now feed the occidental peoples, except that these, in domesticated and specialised breeds, were distributed through this entire cultural region at an appreciably earlier date,—earlier by some thousands of years.38 In late modern times there have been added to the civilised world’s complement of crop plants a very large and important contingent whose domestication and development was worked out in America and the regions of the Pacific; though most of these belong in the low latitudes and are on that account less available to the Western culture than what has come down from the prehistoric cultures of the old world. These are also the work of the stone age, in large part no doubt dating back to palæolithic times.

America, with the Polynesian and Indonesian cultural regions, shows the correlation and the systematic discrepancy in time between the rate, range and magnitude of the advance in tillage on the one hand and of the primary mechanic arts on the other hand. When this culture was interrupted it had, in the mechanical respect, reached an advanced neolithic phase at its best; but its achievements in the crop plants are perhaps to be rated as unsurpassed by all that has been done elsewhere in all time.39 In the primary mechanic arts this cultural region had in the same time reached a stage of perfection comparable at its best with pre-dynastic Egypt, or neolithic Denmark, or pre-Minoan Crete. The really great advance achieved was in the selection, improvement, use and cultivation of the crop plants; and not in any appreciable degree even in the mechanical appliances employed in the cultivation and consumption of these crops; though something considerable is to be noted in this latter respect in such inventions as the mandioca squeezer and the metate; and great things were done in the way of irrigation and road building.40 But the contrast, for instance, between the metate and the contrivances for making paper bread on the one side, and the technologically consummate corn-plant (maize) on the other, should be decisive for the point here in question. The mechanic appliances of corn cultivation had not advanced beyond the digging stick, a rude hoe and a rudimentary spade, though here as well as in other similar connections the local use of well-devised irrigation works, terraced fields,41 and graneries is not to be overlooked; but the corn itself had been brought from its grass-like ancestral form to the maize of the present corn crop. Like most of the American crop plants the maize under selective cultivation had been carried so far from its wild form as no longer to stand a chance of survival in the wild state, and indeed so far that it is still a matter of controversy what its wild ancestor may have been.

Perhaps the races of this American-Polynesian region are gifted with some special degree of spiritual (instinctive) fitness for plant-breeding. They seem to be endowed with a particular proclivity for sympathetically identifying themselves with and patiently waiting upon the course of natural phenomena, perhaps especially the phenomena of animate nature, which never seem alien or incomprehensible to the Indian. Such at least is the consistent suggestion carried by their myths, legends and symbolism. The typical American cosmogony is a tissue of legends of fecundity and growth, even more than appears to hold true of primitive cosmogonies elsewhere.42 And yet some caution in accepting such a generalisation is necessary in view, for instance, of the mythological output along similar lines on the Mediterranean seaboard in early times. By native gift the Indian is a “nature-faker,” given to unlimited anthropomorphism. Mechanical, matter-of-fact appreciation of external and material phenomena seems to be in a peculiar degree difficult, irrelevant and incongruous with the genius of the race. But even if it should seem that this race, or group of races, is peculiarly given to such sympathetic interpretation of natural phenomena in terms of human instinct, the difference between them and the typical racial stocks of the old world in this respect is after all a difference in degree, not in kind. The like proclivity is in good evidence throughout, wherever any race of men have endeavoured to put their acquaintance with natural phenomena into systematic form. The bond of combination in the making of systems, whether cosmologic, mythic, philosophic or scientific, has been some putative human trait or traits. It may be that in their appreciation of facts and their making of systems the American races have by some peculiar native gift been inclined to an interpretation in terms of fertility, growth, nurture and life-cycles.

Any predisposition freely to accept and use the deliverances of sensible perception on their own recognisances simply, in the terms in which they come, and to connect them up in a system of knowledge in their own terms, without imputation of a spiritual (anthropomorphic) substratum,—for the purposes of workmanship such a predisposition should be of the first importance for effective work in the mechanic arts; and a strong instinctive bias to the contrary should be correspondingly pernicious. Any instinctive bias to colour, distort and derange the facts by imputing elements of human nature will unavoidably act to hinder and deflect the agent from an effectual pursuit of mechanical design. But the like is not true in the same degree as regards men’s dealings with animate nature. Anthropomorphic interpretation is more at home and less disserviceable here. With less serious derangement in the objective results, plants and animals may be construed to have a conscious purpose in life and to pursue their ends somewhat after the human fashion; witness the facility with which the story-tellers recount plausible episodes (feigned or real) from the life of animals and plants, and the readiness with which such tales get a hearing. Readers and hearers find no great difficulty, if any, in giving make-believe credence to the tales so long as they recount only such adventures as are physically possible to the animals of which (whom?) they are told; the hearers are always ready to go with the story-teller down this highway of make-believe into the subhuman fairy land. Mechanical phenomena, happenings in the mechanic arts, characteristics of the existence of inanimate objects and the changes which they undergo, lend themselves with much less happy effect to the anthropomorphic story-teller’s make-believe. Episodes from the feigned life-history of tools, machines and raw materials are not drawn on with anything like the same frequency, nor do the tales that recount them meet with the same untiring attention. There is always an unreality about them which even the most robust make-believe can overcome only for a short and doubtful interval. Witness the relative barrenness of primitive folk-tales on this inanimate side, as compared with the exuberance of the myths and legends that interpret the life of plants and animals; and where inanimate phenomena are drawn into the net of personation it happens almost unavoidably that a feigned person is thrown into the foreground of the tale plausibly to take the part of bearer, controller or intrigant in the episodes related.43

Even more to the same purpose, as showing the same insidious facility of anthropomorphic interpretation, are the bona-fide constructions of scientists and pseudo-scientists running on the imputation of purpose and deliberation to explain the behaviour of animals. Indeed, at the worst, and still in good faith, it may go so far as to impute some sort of quasi-conscious striving on the part of plants.44 As good and temperate an instance as may be had of such anthropomorphic imputation of workmanlike gifts is afforded, for instance, by the work of Romanes on the behaviour of animals.45 It goes to show how very plausibly some of the lower animals may be credited with these spiritual aptitudes and how far and well the imputation may be made to serve the scientist’s end. So plausible, indeed, is this anthropomorphism as to disarm even the scepticism of the trained sceptic. It will also appear in the later course of this inquiry that anthropomorphism, and especially the imputation of workmanship, has borne a much greater part in the work of the scientists than the members of that craft would like to avow; so that the scientific use of the anthropomorphic fancy is by no means a unique distinction of Romanes and the large group or school of biologists of which his work is typical; nor does the presence of this bias in their work by any means strip it of scientific value. In point of fact, it seems to touch the substance of their objective results much less seriously than might be apprehended.

The modern scientist’s watchward is scepticism and caution; and what he may be led to do concessively, in spite of himself, by too broad a consciousness of kind, the savage does joyously and with conviction. His measure of what he sees about him is himself, and his apprehension of what takes place is a comprehension of how such things would be done in the course of human conduct if they were physically possible to man. The man (more often perhaps the woman) who busies himself with the beginnings of plant and animal-breeding will sympathetically put himself in touch with their inclinations and aptitudes with a degree of intimacy and assurance never approached by the followers of Romanes. It is for him to use common sense and fall in with the drift and idiosyncracies of these others who are, mysteriously, denied the gift of speech. By the unambiguous leading of the anthropomorphic fancy he puts himself in the place of his ward, his animal or vegetable friend and cousin, and can so learn something of what is going on in the putative vegetable or animal mind, through patient observation of what comes to light in response to his attentions in the course of his joint life with them. The plant or animal manifestly does things, and the question follows, Why do these speechless others do those things which they are seen to do?—things which often do not lie within the range of things desirable to be accomplished, humanly speaking. Manifestly these non-human others seek other ends and seek them in other ways than man. Some of the objective results which it lies in their nature to accomplish in so working out their scheme of life are useful to their human cousins; and it stands to reason that when they are dealt kindly with, when man takes pains to further their ends in life, they will take thought and respond somewhat in kind. To turn the proposition about, those things which men find, by trial and error, to bring a good and kindly return from the speechless others are manifestly well received by them and must obviously be of a kind to fall in with their bent and minister to their inclinations; and prudence and fellow-feeling combine to lead men farther along the way so indicated at each move in the propitious direction.

To the unsophisticated—and even to the sophisticated sceptic—it is manifest that animate objects do things. What they aim to do, as well as the logic of their conduct in carrying out their designs, are not precisely the same as in the case of man. But by staying by and learning what they are bent on doing, and observing how they go about it, any peculiarity in the nature of their needs, spiritual and physical, and in their manner of approaching their ends, may be learned and assimilated; and their life-work can be furthered and amplified by judiciously ministering to their ascertained needs and making the way smooth for them in what they undertake, so long as their undertakings are such as man is interested in bringing to a successful issue. Of course they work toward ends that are good in their sight, though not always such as men would seek; but that is their affair and is not to be pried into beyond the bounds of a decent neighbourly interest. And they work by methods in some degree other, often wiser, than those of men, and these it is man’s place to learn if he would profit by their companionship.

Much of the scheme of life of these speechless others is a scheme of fecundity, growth and nurture, and all these matters are natural to women rather than to men; and so in the early stages of culture the consciousness of kind and congruity has made it plain to all the parties in interest that the care of crops and animals belongs in the fitness of things to women. Indeed there is such a spiritual (magical) community between women and the fecundity of animate things that any intrusion of the men in the affairs of growth and fertility may by force of contrast come to be viewed with the liveliest apprehension. Since the life of plants and animals is primarily of a spiritual nature, since the initiative and trend of vegetable and animal life is of this character, it follows that some sort of propitious spiritual contact and communion should be maintained between mankind and that world of fertility and growth in which these animate things live and move. So a line of communication, of a spiritual kind, is kept open with the realm of the speechless ones by means of a sign-language systematised into ritual, and by a symbolism of amity reënforced with gifts and professions of good-will. Hence a growth of occult meanings and ceremonial procedure, to which the argument will have to return presently.46

By this indirect, animistic and magical, line of approach the matter-of-fact requirements of tillage and cattle-breeding can be determined and fulfilled in a very passable fashion, given only the necessary time and tranquillity. Time is by common consent allowed the stone-age culture in abundant measure; and common consent is coming, through one consideration and another, to admit that the requisite conditions of peace and quiet industry are also a characteristic feature of that early time. The fact, broad and profound, that the known crop plants and animals were for the most part domesticated in that time is perhaps in itself the most persuasive argument for the prevalence of peaceful conditions among those peoples, whoever they may have been, to whose efforts, or rather to whose routine of genial superstition, this domestication is to be credited. This domestication and use of plants and animals was of course not a mere blindfold diversion. Here as ever the instinct of workmanship was present with its prompting to make the most of what comes to hand; and the technology of husbandry, like the technology of any other industrial enterprise, has been the outcome of men’s abiding penchant for making things useful.

The peculiar advantage of tillage and cattle-breeding over the primary mechanic arts, that by which the former arts gained and kept their lead, seems to have been the simple circumstance that the propensity of workmanlike men to impute a workmanlike (teleological) nature to phenomena does not leave the resulting knowledge of these phenomena so wide of the mark in the case of animate nature as in that of brute matter. It will probably not do to say that the anthropomorphic imputation has been directly serviceable to the technological end in the case of tillage and cattle-breeding; it is rather that the disadvantage or disserviceability of such an interpretation of facts has been greater in the mechanic arts in early times. The instinct of workmanship, through the sentimental propensity to impute workmanlike qualities and conduct to external facts, has defeated itself more effectually in the mechanic arts. And as in the course of time, under favourable local conditions, the habitual imputation of teleological capacities has in some measure fallen into disuse, the mechanic arts have gained; and every such gain has in its turn, as conditions permitted, acted cumulatively toward the discredit and disuse of the teleological method of knowledge, and therefore toward an acceleration of technological gain in this field.

The inanimate factors which early man has to turn to account as a condition precedent to any appreciable advance in the industrial arts, outside of husbandry and of the use of fruits and fibres associated with it, do not lend themselves to an effectual approximation from the anthropomorphic side. Flint and similar minerals are refractory, they have no spiritual nature and no scheme or cycle of life that can be interpreted in some passable fashion as the outcome of instinctive propensities and workmanlike management. Anthropomorphic insight does not penetrate into the secret ways of brute matter, for all the reasonable concession to idiosyncracies, to recondite conceits, occult means and devious methods, with which unsophisticated man stands ready to meet them. He can see as far into a millstone as anyone along that line; but that is not far enough to be of any use, and he is debarred by his workmanlike common sense from systematically looking into the matter along any other line. It is only the blindfold, unsystematic accretions of opaque fact coming in, disjointed and unsympathetic, from the inhuman side of his technological experience that can help him out here. And experience of that kind can come upon him only inadvertently, for he has no basis on which to systematise these facts as they come, and so he has no means of intelligently seeking them. His intelligent endeavours to get at the nature of things will perforce go on the mass of knowledge which his intelligence has already comprehended, which is a knowledge of human conduct. Anthropomorphism is almost wholly obstructive in this field of brute matter, and in early times, before much in the way of accumulated matter-of-fact knowledge had forced itself upon men, the propensity to a teleological interpretation seems to have been nearly decisive against technological progress in the primary and indispensable mechanic arts. And in later phases of culture, where anthropomorphic interpretations of workmanship have been worked out into a rounded system of magic and religion, they have at times brought the technological advance to a full stop, particularly on the mechanical side, and have even led to the cancelment of gains that should have seemed secure.

It is likewise a notable fact that, as already intimated above, myth and legend have found this brute matter as refractory in their service as the instinct of workmanship has found it in the genesis of technology; and for the good reason that the same human penchant for teleological insight and elaboration has ruled in the one as in the other. Inanimate matter and the phenomena in which inanimate matter manifests its nature and force have, of course, taken a large place in folk-lore; but the folk-lore, whether myth, legend or magic, in which inanimate matter is conceived as speaking in its own right and working out its own spiritual content is relatively very scant. In magic it commonly plays a part as an instrumentality only, and indeed as an instrument which owes its magical efficacy to some efficacious circumstance external to it. It has most frequently an induced rather than intrinsic efficacy, being the vehicle whereby the worker of magic materialises and conveys his design to its execution. It is susceptible of magical use, rather than creative of magical effects.47 No doubt this characterisation of the magical offices of inert matter applies to early and primitive times and situations rather than to the high-wrought later systems of occult science and alchemical lore that are built on some appreciable knowledge of metallurgy and chemical reactions. So likewise early myth and legend have had to take recourse to the intervention of personal, or at least animate agents, to make headway in the domain of brute matter, which figures commonly as means in the hands of manlike agents of some sort, rather than as a self-directing agent with initiative and a natural bent of its own. The phenomena of inanimate nature are likely to be thrown into the hands of such putative agents, who are then conceived to control them and turn them to account for ulterior ends not given in the native character of the inanimate objects themselves.48 Even so exceptionally available a range of phenomena as those of fire have not escaped this inglorious eventuality. In the mythical legends of fire it will be found that the fire and all its works come into the plot of the story only as secondary elements, and the interest centres about the fortunes of some manlike agency to whose initiative and exploits all the phenomena of fire are referred as their cause or occasion.49 The legends of fire have commonly become legends of a fire-bringer, etc.,50 and have come to turn about the plots and counterplots of anthropomorphic beasts and divinities who are conceived to have wrestled for, with and about the use of fire.

So, on the other hand, as an illustration from the side of technology, to show how matters stood in this connection through the best days of anthropomorphism, fire had been in daily and indispensable use through an indefinite series of millennia before men, in the early modern times of Occidental civilisation, learned the use of a chimney. And all that hindered the discovery of this simple mechanical expedient seems to have been the fatal propensity of men to impute a teleological nature and workmanlike design to this phenomenon with which no truce or working arrangement can be negotiated in spiritual terms.51

A doubt may plausibly suggest itself as to the competency of such an explanation of these phenomena. It would seem scarcely to lie in the nature of an instinct of workmanship to enlist the workman in the acquisition of knowledge which he cannot use, and guide him in elaborating it into a system which will defeat his own ends; to build up obstructions to its own working, and yet in the long run to overcome them. In part this discrepancy in the outcome arises from the fact that the sense of workmanship affords a norm of systematisation for the facts that come into knowledge. This leads to something like a dramatisation of the facts, whereby they fall into some sort of a sequence of conduct among themselves, become personalised, are conceived as gifted with discrimination, inclinations, preferences and initiative; and in so far as the facts are conceived to be involved in immaterial or hyperphysical relations of this character they cannot effectually be made use of for the purposes of technology. All conceptions that exceed the scope of material fact are useless for technology, and in so far as such conceptions are intruded into the body of information drawn on by the workman they become obstructive.

But in good part the discrepancies of the outcome are due to complications with an instinctive curiosity, the presence of which has tacitly been assumed throughout the argument,—an “idle” curiosity by force of which men, more or less insistently, want to know things, when graver interests do not engross their attention. Comparatively little has been made of this instinctive propensity by the students of culture, though the fact of its presence in human nature is broadly recognised by psychologists,52 and the like penchant comes in evidence among the lower animals, as appears in many investigations of animal behaviour.53 Indeed, it has been taken somewhat lightly, in a general way, as being a genial infirmity of human nature rather than a creative factor in civilisation. And the reason of its being dealt with in so slight a manner is probably to be found in the nature of the instinct itself. With the instinct of workmanship it shares that character of pliancy and tractability common in some degree to the whole range of instincts, and especially characteristic of those instinctive predispositions that distinguish human nature from the simpler and more refractory spiritual endowment of the lower animals.

Like the other instinctive propensities, it is to be presumed, the idle curiosity takes effect only within the bounds of that metabolic margin of surplus energy that comes in evidence in all animal life, but that appears in larger proportions in the “higher” animals and in a peculiarly obtrusive manner in the life of man. It seems to be only after the demands of the simpler, more immediately organic functions, such as nutrition, growth and reproduction, have been met in some passably sufficient measure that this vaguer range of instincts which constitutes the spiritual predispositions of man can effectually draw on the energies of the organism and so can go into effect in what is recognised as human conduct. The wider the margin of disposable energy, therefore, the more freely should the characteristically human predispositions assert their sway, and the more nearly this metabolic margin is drained by the elemental needs of the organism the less chance should there be that conduct will be guided by what may properly be called the spiritual needs of man. It is accordingly characteristic of this whole range of vaguer and less automatically determinate predispositions that they transiently yield somewhat easily to the pressure of circumstances. This is eminently true of the idle curiosity, as it is also true in a somewhat comparable degree of the sense of workmanship. But these instincts at the same time, and perhaps by the same fact, have also the other concomitant and characteristically human trait of a ubiquitous resiliency whenever and in so far as there is nothing to hinder. Their staying power is, in a way, very great, though their driving force is neither massive nor intractable. So that even though the idle curiosity, like the sense of workmanship, may be momentarily thrust aside by more urgent interests, yet its long-term effects in human culture are very considerable. Men will commonly make easy terms with their curiosity when there is a call to action under the spur of a more elemental need, and even when circumstances appear to be favourable to its untroubled functioning a sustained and consistent response to its incitement is by no means an assured consequence. The common man does not eagerly pursue the quest of the idle curiosity, and neither its guidance nor its award of fact is mandatory on him.54 Sporadic individuals who are endowed with this supererogatory gift largely in excess of the common run, or who yield to its enticements with very exceptional abandon, are accounted dreamers, or in extreme cases their more sensible neighbours may even rate them as of unsound mind. But the long-term consequences of the common run of curiosity, helped out by such sporadic individuals in whom the idle curiosity runs at a higher tension, counts up finally, because cumulatively, into the most substantial cultural achievement of the race,—its systematised knowledge and quasi-knowledge of things.

This instinctive curiosity, then, comes in now and again serviceably to accelerate the gain in technological insight by bringing in material information that may be turned to account, as well as by persistently disturbing the habitual body of knowledge on which workmanship draws. Human curiosity is doubtless an “idle” propensity, in the sense that no utilitarian aim enters in its habitual exercise; but the material information which is by this means drawn into the agent’s available knowledge may none the less come to serve the ends of workmanship. A good share of the facts taken cognisance of under the spur of curiosity is of no effect for workmanship or for technological insight, and that any of it should be found serviceable is substantially a fortuitous circumstance. This character of “idleness,” the absence of a utilitarian aim or utilitarian sentiment in the impulse of curiosity, is doubtless a great part of the reason for its having received such scant and rather slighting treatment at the hands of the psychologists and of the students of civilisation alike.

Of the material so offered as knowledge, or fact, workmanship makes use of whatever is available. In ways already indicated this utilisation of ascertained “facts” is both furthered and hindered by the fact that the information which comes to hand through the restless curiosity of man is reduced to systematic shape, for the most part or wholly, under canons of workmanship. For the large generality of human knowledge this will mean that the raw material of observed fact is selectively worked over, connected up and accumulated on lines of a putative teleological order of things, cast in something like a dramatic form. From which it follows that the knowledge so gained is held and carried over from generation to generation in a form which lends itself with facility to a workmanlike manipulation; it is already digested for assimilation in a scheme of teleology that instinctively commends itself to the workmanlike sense of fitness. But it also follows that in so far as the personalised, teleological, or dramatic order so imputed to the facts does not, by chance, faithfully reflect the causal relations subsisting among these facts, the utilisation of them as technological elements will amount to a borrowing of trouble. So that the concurrence of curiosity and workmanship in the assimilation of facts in this way may, and in early culture must, result in a retardation of the technological advance, as contrasted with what might conceivably have been the outcome of this work of the idle curiosity if it had not been congenitally contaminated with the sense of workmanship and thereby lent itself to conceptions of magical efficacy rather than to mechanical efficiency.55

The further bearing of the parental bent on the early growth of technology also merits attention in this connection. This instinct and the sentiments that arise out of its promptings will have had wide and free play in early times, when the common good of the group was still perforce the chief economic interest in the habitual view of all its members. It will have had an immediate effect on the routine of life and work, presumably far beyond what is to be looked for at any later stage. In the time when pecuniary competition had not yet become an institution, grounded in the ownership of goods in severalty and on their competitive consumption, the promptings of this instinct will have been more insistent and will have met with a more unguarded response than later on, after these institutional changes have taken effect. A manifest and inveterate distaste of waste, in great part traceable on analysis to this instinct, still persistently comes in evidence in all communities, although it is greatly disguised and distorted by the principles of conspicuous waste56 among all those peoples that have adopted private ownership of goods; and serviceability to the common good likewise never ceases to command at least a genial, speculative approval from the common run of men, though this, too, may often take some grotesque or nugatory form due to preconceptions of a pecuniary kind. This bias for serviceability and against waste falls in directly with the promptings of the instinct of workmanship, so that these two instinctive predispositions will reënforce one another in conducing to an impersonally economical use of materials and resources as well as to the full use of workmanlike capacities, and to an endless taking of pains.

Some reference has also been made already to the technological value of those kindly, “humane” sentiments that are bound up with the parental bent,—if they may not rather be said substantially to constitute the parental bent. It is of course in the non-mechanical arts of plant and animal breeding that these humane extensions of the parental instinct have their chief if not their only industrial value, both in furthering the day’s work and in contributing to the advance of technology. In the primary mechanic arts, e. g., an affectionate disposition of this kind toward the inanimate appliances with which their work is occupied does no doubt still, as ever, to some extent animate the workmen as well as those who may have the remoter oversight of the work. But the part played by such humane sentiments is after all relatively slight in men’s dealings with brute matter, nor do they invariably conduce to expeditious work or to a hard-headed insight into the mechanics of those things with which this work has to do. In fact such tender emotions so placed may somewhat easily become a source of mischief, in a manner similar to the mischievous technological consequences of anthropomorphism already spoken of.

It is otherwise with the bearing of the parental bent on the arts of tillage and cattle-breeding. Here its promptings are almost wholly serviceable to technological gain as well as to assiduous workmanship. The kindly sentiments intrinsic to the parental bent are admirably in place in the care of plants and animals, and their good effects in so giving a propitious turn to the technology of early tillage and cattle-breeding are only re-enforced by the parental and workmanlike inclination to husband resources and make the most of what comes to hand. The particular turn given to the anthropomorphic bias by this line of preconceptions also is rather favourable than otherwise to a working insight into the requirements of the art. And it has had certain specific consequences for the early technology of husbandry, as well as for the early culture in which husbandry was the chief material factor, such as to call for a more circumstantial account.

Under the canons of workmanship a teleological animus—an instinctive or “spiritual” nature—is imputed to the plants and animals brought into domestication. The art of husbandry proceeds on the apprehended needs and proclivities so imputed, and the technology of the craft therefore takes the form of a “tendance” designed to further these quasi-animistically conceived beings in whatever ends they have at heart by virtue of their natural bent, and to so direct this tendance upon them as will conduce to shaping their scheme of life in ways advantageous to man. Like other sentient beings, as is known to shrewd and unsophisticated man, they have spiritual needs as well as material needs, and they are putatively to be influenced by the attitude of their human cousins towards them and their conduct, interests, and adventures. Further, their life and comfort are manifestly conditioned by the run of the seasons and of the weather; various inclemencies are discouraging and discomforting to them, as to mankind, and other vicissitudes of rain and shine and tempest are of the gravest consequence to them for good or ill. Under these delicate circumstances it is incumbent on the keepers of crops and flocks to walk circumspectly and cultivate the good-will not only of their crops and flocks but also of the natural phenomena that count for so much in the life of the crops and flocks. These natural phenomena are of course also conceived anthropomorphically, in the sense that they too are seen to follow their natural bent and do what they will,—or perhaps more commonly what the personal agents will, in whose keeping these natural phenomena are conceived to lie; for unsophisticated man has no other available terms in which to conceive them and their behaviour than the terms of initiative, design and endeavour immediately given in his own conscious action.

Now, as has already been said, the scheme of life of the crops and flocks is, at least in the main, and particularly in so far as it vitally and always interests their keepers, a scheme of fecundity, fertility and growth. But these matters, visibly and by conscious sentiment, pertain in a peculiarly intimate sense to the women. They are matters in which the sympathetic insight and fellow-feeling of womankind should in the nature of things come very felicitously to further the propitious course of things. Besides which the life of the women falls in these same lines of fecundity, nurture and growth, so that their association and attendance on the flocks and crops should further the propitious course of things also by the subtler means of sympathetic suggestion. There is a magical congruity of great force as between womankind and the propagation of growing things. And these subtler ways of influencing events are especially to the point in all contact with these non-human sentient beings, since they are speechless and must therefore in the main be led by living example rather than by precept and expostulation. And, again, being sentient, somewhat after the fashion of mankind, it is not to be believed that they have not the gift visibly common to mankind and many animals, of following their leader by force of sympathetic imitation. It may not be easy to say how far this instinctive impulse of imitation, necessarily credited to all phenomena to which anthropomorphic traits are imputed, is to be accounted the ground of all sympathetic magic; but it is at least to be accepted as sufficient to account for much of what is done to induce fertility in flocks and crops.

So that on many accounts it is evident that in the nature of things, the care of flocks and crops is the women’s affair, and it follows that all intercourse with the flocks and crops in the early days had best be conducted by the women, who alone may be presumed intuitively to apprehend what is timely, due and permissible in these premises. It is all the more evident that communion with these wordless others should fall to the women, since the like wordless communion with their own young is perhaps the most notable and engaging trait of their own motherhood. The parental bent also throws a stress of sentiment on this simple and obvious phase of motherhood, such as has made it in all men’s apprehension the type of all kindly and unselfish tendance; at the same time this ubiquitous parental instinct tends constantly to place motherhood in the foreground in all that concerns the common good, in as much as all that is worth while, humanly speaking, has its beginning here. In that early phase of culture in which the beginnings of tillage and cattle-breeding were made and in which the common good of the group was still the chief daily interest about which men’s solicitude and forethought are habitually engaged, motherhood will always have been the central fact in the scheme of human things. So that in this cultural phase the parental bent and the sense of workmanship will have worked together to bring the women into the chief place in the technological scheme; and the sense of imitative propriety, as well as the recognised constraining force exercised by example and mimetic representation through the impulse of imitation, will have guided workmanship shrewdly to play up womankind and motherhood in an ever-growing scheme of magical observances designed to further the natural increase of flocks and crops. Where anthropomorphic imputation runs free and with conviction, such observances, designed to act sympathetically on the natural course of phenomena, unavoidably become an integral feature of the technological scheme, no less indispensable and putatively no less efficacious to this end than the mechanical operations with which these observances are associated. There is no practicable line of division to be drawn between sympathetic magic and anthropomorphic technology; and in the known cultures of this early type it is for the most part an open question whether the magical observances are to be accounted an adjunct to what we would recognise as the technological routine of the art, or conversely. The two are not commonly held apart as distinct categories, and both are efficacious and indispensable; and in both the felt efficacy runs on much the same grounds of imputed anthropomorphic traits.57

On grounds of magical-technological expediency, then, as well as by force of the sense of intrinsic propriety, women come to take the leading rôle in the industrial community of the early time, and the community’s material interests come to centre about them and their relation to the natural products of the fields; and since this interest bears immediately on the fecundity of the flocks and crops, it is particularly in their character of motherhood that the women come most vitally into the case. The natural produce on which the life of the group depends, therefore, will appertain to the women, in some intimate sense of congruity, so that in the fitness of things this produce will properly come to the good of the community through their hands and will logically be dispensed somewhat at their discretion. So great is the reach of this logic of congruity that in the known cultures which show much reminiscence of this early technological phase it is commonly possible to detect some remnant of such discretionary control of the natural produce by the women. And modern students, imbued with modern preconceptions of ownership and predaceous mastery, have even found themselves constrained by this evidence to discover a system of matriarchy and maternal ownership in these usages that antedate the institution of ownership. Conceivably, the usages growing out of this preferential position of women in the technology and ritual of early husbandry will, now and again, by the uniform drift of habituation have attained such a degree of consistency, been wrought into so rigid a form of institutions, as to have been carried over into a later phase of culture in which the ownership of goods is of the essence of the scheme; and in such case these usages may then have come to be reconstrued in terms of ownership, to the effect that the ownership of agricultural products vests of right in the woman, the mother of the household.

But if the magical-technological fitness and efficacy of women has led to the growth of institutions vesting the disposal of the produce in the women, in a more or less discretionary way, the like effect has been even more pronounced, comprehensive and lasting as regards the immaterial developments of the case. With great uniformity the evidence from the earlier peaceable agricultural civilisations runs to the effect that the primitive ritual of husbandry, chiefly of a magical character, is in the hands of the women and is made up of observances presumed to be particularly consonant with the phenomena of motherhood.58 And presently, when the more elaborate phases of these magical rites of husbandry come, by further superinduction of anthropomorphism, to grow into religious observances and mythological tenets, the greater daimones and divinities that emerge in the shuffle are women, and again it is the motherhood of women that is in evidence. The deities, great and small, are prevailingly females; and the great ones among them seem invariably to have set out with being mothers.

In the creation of female and maternal divinities the parental instinct has doubtless greatly re-enforced the drift of the instinct of workmanship in the same direction. The female deities have two main attributes or characteristics because of which they came to hold their high place; they are goddesses of fertility in one way or another, and they are mothers of the people. It is perhaps unnecessary to hold these two concomitant attributions apart, as many if not most of the great deities claim precedence on both grounds. But the lower orders of female divinities in the matriarchal scheme of things divine will much more commonly specialise in fertility of crops than in maternity of the people. The number of divinities that have mainly or solely to do with fertility is greater than that of those which figure as mothers of the people, either locally or generally. And perhaps in the majority of cases there is some suggestive evidence that the great female deities have primarily been goddesses of fertility having to do with the growth of crops—and, usually in the second place, of animals—rather than primarily mothers of the tribe;59 which would suggest that their genesis and character is due to the canons of the sense of workmanship more than to the parental bent, although the latter seems to have had its part in shaping many of them if not all.

The female divinities belong characteristically to the early or simpler agricultural civilisation, and what has been said goes to argue that they rest on technological grounds in the main; indeed, in their genesis and early growth, they are in good part of the nature of technological expedients. They are at home with the female technology of early tillage especially, and perhaps only in the second place do they serve the magical and religious needs of peoples given mainly to breeding flocks and herds; although it is to be noted that most of the greater known goddesses of the ancient Western world, as well as many of the minor ones, are also found to be closely related to various of the domestic animals. In America and the Far East, of course, any connection with the domestication of animals would appear improbable.

With a change of base, from this early husbandry to a civilisation in which the main habitual interest is of another kind, and in which the habitual outlook of men is less closely limited by the same anthropomorphic conceptions of nurture and growth, the goddesses begin to lose their preferential claim on men’s regard and fall into place as adjuncts or consorts of male divinities designed on other lines and built out of different materials and serving new ends.60 But the hegemony of the mother goddesses has unquestionably been very wide-reaching and very enduring, as it should be to answer to the extent in time and space of the civilisation of tillage as well as to its paramount importance in the life of mankind, and as it is shown to have been by the archæological and ethnological evidence.

A further concomitant variation in the cultural scheme, associated with and presumably traceable to the same technological ground, is maternal descent, the counting of relationship primarily or solely in the female line. In the present state of the evidence on this head it would probably be too broad a proposition to say that the counting of relationship by the mother’s side is due wholly to preconceptions arising out of the technology of fertility and growth and that it so is remotely a creature of the instinct of workmanship; but it is at least equally probable that that ancient conceit must be abandoned according to which the system of maternal descent arises out of an habitual doubt of paternity. The mere obvious congruity of the cognatic system as contrasted with the agnatic, has presumably had as much to do with the matter as anything, and under the rule of the primitive technology of tillage and cattle-breeding this obvious congruity of the cognate relationship will have been very materially re-enforced by the current preconceptions regarding the preferential importance of the female line for the welfare of the household and the community. And so long as that technological era lasted, and until the more strenuous culture of predation and coercion came on and threw the male element in the community into the place of first consequence, maternal descent as well as the mother goddess appear to have held their own.

It will have been noticed that through all this argument runs the presumption that the culture which included the beginnings and early growth of tillage and cattle-breeding was substantially a peaceable culture. This presumption is somewhat at variance with the traditional view, particularly with the position taken as a matter of course by earlier students of ethnology in the nineteenth century. Still it is probably not subject to very serious question today. As the evidence has accumulated it has grown increasingly manifest that the ancient assumption of a primitive state of nature after the school of Hobbes cannot be accepted. The evidence from contemporary sources, as to the state of things in this respect among savages and many of the lower barbarians, points rather to peace than to war as the habitual situation, although this evidence is by no means unequivocal; besides which, the evidence from these contemporary lower cultures bears only equivocally on the point of first interest here,—viz., the antecedents of the Western civilisation. What is more to the point, though harder to get at in any definitive way, is the prehistory of this civilisation. Here the inquiry will perforce go on survivals and reminiscences and on the implications of known facts of antiquity as well as of certain features still extant in the current cultural scheme.

It seems antecedently improbable that the domestication of the crop plants and animals could have been effected at all except among peoples leading a passably peaceable, and presently a sedentary life. And the length of time required for what was achieved in remote antiquity in this respect speaks for the prevalence of (passably) peaceable conditions over intervals of time and space that overpass all convenient bounds of chronology and localisation. Evidence of maternal descent, maternal religious practices and maternal discretion in the disposal of goods meet the inquiry in ever increasing force as soon as it begins to penetrate back of the conventionally accepted dawn of history; and survivals and reminiscences of such institutions appear here and there within the historical period with increasing frequency the more painstaking the inquiry becomes. And that institutions of this character require a peaceable situation for their genesis as well as for their survival is not only antecedently probable on grounds of congruity, but it is evidenced by the way in which they incontinently decay and presently disappear wherever the cultural situation takes on a predatory character or develops a large-scale civilisation, with a coercive government, differentiation of classes—especially in the pecuniary respect—warlike ideals and ambitions, and a considerable accumulation of wealth.

Some further discussion of this early peaceable situation will necessarily come up in connection with the technological grounds of its disappearance at the transition to that predatory culture which has displaced it in all cases where an appreciably advanced phase of civilisation has been reached.