entiated
form of an inchoate animistic belief, or in the later and more highly
integrated phase in which there is an anthropomorphic personification of
the propensity imputed to facts. The industrial value of such a lively
animistic sense, or of such recourse to a preternatural agency or the
guidance of an unseen hand, is of course very much the same in either
case. As affects the industrial serviceability of the individual, the
effect is of the same kind in either case; but the extent to which
this habit of thought dominates or shapes the complex of his habits of
thought varies with the degree of immediacy, urgency, or exclusiveness
with which the individual habitually applies the animistic or
anthropomorphic formula in dealing with the facts of his environment.
The animistic habit acts in all cases to blur the appreciation of causal
sequence; but the earlier, less reflected, less defined animistic sense
of propensity may be expected to affect the intellectual processes
of the individual in a more pervasive way than the higher forms of
anthropomorphism. Where the animistic habit is present in the naive
form, its scope and range of application are not defined or limited.
It will therefore palpably affect his thinking at every turn of the
person's life--wherever he has to do with the material means of life.
In the later, maturer development of animism, after it has been defined
through the process of anthropomorphic elaboration, when its application
has been limited in a somewhat consistent fashion to the remote and the
invisible, it comes about that an increasing range of everyday facts are
provisionally accounted for without recourse to the preternatural agency
in which a cultivated animism expresses itself. A highly integrated,
personified preternatural agency is not a convenient means of handling
the trivial occurrences of life, and a habit is therefore easily fallen
into of accounting for many trivial or vulgar phenomena in terms of
sequence. The provisional explanation so arrived at is by neglect
allowed to stand as definitive, for trivial purposes, until special
provocation or perplexity recalls the individual to his allegiance. But
when special exigencies arise, that is to say, when there is peculiar
need of a full and free recourse to the law of cause and effect, then
the individual commonly has recourse to the preternatural agency as a
universal solvent, if he is possessed of an anthropomorphic belief.

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