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.