ot to be overlooked. And even these
high-class cults of the Western culture do not represent the last
dissolving phase of this human sense of extra-causal propensity. Beyond
these the same animistic sense shows itself also in such attenuations of
anthropomorphism as the eighteenth-century appeal to an order of nature
and natural rights, and in their modern representative, the ostensibly
post-Darwinian concept of a meliorative trend in the process of
evolution. This animistic explanation of phenomena is a form of the
fallacy which the logicians knew by the name of ignava ratio. For
the purposes of industry or of science it counts as a blunder in the
apprehension and valuation of facts. Apart from its direct industrial
consequences, the animistic habit has a certain significance for
economic theory on other grounds. (1) It is a fairly reliable indication
of the presence, and to some extent even of the degree of potency,
of certain other archaic traits that accompany it and that are of
substantial economic consequence; and (2) the material consequences of
that code of devout proprieties to which the animistic habit gives rise
in the development of an anthropomorphic cult are of importance both
(a) as affecting the community's consumption of goods and the prevalent
canons of taste, as already suggested in an earlier chapter, and (b) by
inducing and conserving a certain habitual recognition of the relation
to a superior, and so stiffening the current sense of status and
allegiance.

As regards the point last named (b), that body of habits of thought
which makes up the character of any individual is in some sense an
organic whole. A marked variation in a given direction at any one point
carries with it, as its correlative, a concomitant variation in the
habitual expression of life in other directions or other groups of
activities. These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions
of life, are all phases of the single life sequence of the individual;
therefore a habit formed in response to a given stimulus will
necessarily affect the character of the response made to other stimuli.
A modification of human nature at any one point is a modification of
human nature as a whole. On this ground, and perhaps to a still greater
extent on obscurer grounds that can not be discussed here, there are
these concomitant variations as between the different traits of human
nature. So, for instance, barbarian peoples with a well-develope