hat for the
purpose of the collective life of today, especially so far as concerns
the industrial efficiency of the modern community, the characteristic
traits of the devout temperament are a hindrance rather than a help.
It should accordingly be found that the modern industrial life tends
selectively to eliminate these traits of human nature from the spiritual
constitution of the classes that are immediately engaged in the
industrial process. It should hold true, approximately, that devoutness
is declining or tending to obsolescence among the members of what may
be called the effective industrial community. At the same time it should
appear that this aptitude or habit survives in appreciably greater vigor
among those classes which do not immediately or primarily enter into the
community's life process as an industrial factor.

It has already been pointed out that these latter classes, which live
by, rather than in, the industrial process, are roughly comprised under
two categories (1) the leisure class proper, which is shielded from
the stress of the economic situation; and (2) the indigent classes,
including the lower-class delinquents, which are unduly exposed to
the stress. In the case of the former class an archaic habit of mind
persists because no effectual economic pressure constrains this class to
an adaptation of its habits of thought to the changing situation; while
in the latter the reason for a failure to adjust their habits of thought
to the altered requirements of industrial efficiency is innutrition,
absence of such surplus of energy as is needed in order to make the
adjustment with facility, together with a lack of opportunity to acquire
and become habituated to the modern point of view. The trend of the
selective process runs in much the same direction in both cases.

From the point of view which the modern industrial life inculcates,
phenomena are habitually subsumed under the quantitative relation of
mechanical sequence. The indigent classes not only fall short of the
modicum of leisure necessary in order to appropriate and assimilate
the more recent generalizations of science which this point of view
involves, but they also ordinarily stand in such a relation of personal
dependence or subservience to their pecuniary superiors as materially to
retard their emancipation from habits of thought proper to the regime
of status. The result is that these classes in some measure retain that
general habit of