constantly increasing extent, being organized in a
comprehensive system of organs and functions mutually conditioning one
another; and therefore freedom from all bias in the causal apprehension
of phenomena grows constantly more requisite to efficiency on the
part of the men concerned in industry. Under a system of handicraft an
advantage in dexterity, diligence, muscular force, or endurance may, in
a very large measure, offset such a bias in the habits of thought of the
workmen.

Similarly in agricultural industry of the traditional kind, which
closely resembles handicraft in the nature of the demands made upon
the workman. In both, the workman is himself the prime mover chiefly
depended upon, and the natural forces engaged are in large part
apprehended as inscrutable and fortuitous agencies, whose working lies
beyond the workman's control or discretion. In popular apprehension
there is in these forms of industry relatively little of the industrial
process left to the fateful swing of a comprehensive mechanical sequence
which must be comprehended in terms of causation and to which the
operations of industry and the movements of the workmen must be adapted.
As industrial methods develop, the virtues of the handicraftsman count
for less and less as an offset to scanty intelligence or a halting
acceptance of the sequence of cause and effect. The industrial
organization assumes more and more of the character of a mechanism, in
which it is man's office to discriminate and select what natural forces
shall work out their effects in his service. The workman's part in
industry changes from that of a prime mover to that of discrimination
and valuation of quantitative sequences and mechanical facts. The
faculty of a ready apprehension and unbiased appreciation of causes in
his environment grows in relative economic importance and any element in
the complex of his habits of thought which intrudes a bias at
variance with this ready appreciation of matter-of-fact sequence gains
proportionately in importance as a disturbing element acting to lower
his industrial usefulness. Through its cumulative effect upon the
habitual attitude of the population, even a slight or inconspicuous bias
towards accounting for everyday facts by recourse to other ground than
that of quantitative causation may work an appreciable lowering of the
collective industrial efficiency of a community.

The animistic habit of mind may occur in the early, undiffer