The pecuniary culture is not singular in this matter. Always and everywhere the acquirement of knowledge is a matter of observation guided and filled out by the imputation of qualities, relations and aptitudes to the observed phenomena. Without this putative content of active presence and potency the phenomena would lack reality; they could not be assimilated in the scheme of things human. It is only a commonplace of the logic of apperception that the substantial traits of objective facts are a figment of the brain. Under the discipline of this pecuniary phase of culture the requisite imputation of character to facts runs, as ever, in anthropomorphic terms; but it is an anthropomorphism which by habit conforms to the predatory-pecuniary scheme of preconceptions, such as the routine of life has made ready and convincing to men living under the discipline of emulation, invidious distinctions and authentic pecuniary decorum. Under these circumstances it is not in the anthropomorphism of naïve workmanship that the putative reality of facts is to be sought, but in their conformity to the conventionally definitive preconceptions of invidious merit, authentic excellence, force of character, mastery, complaisance, congruity with the run of the established institutional values and the ordinances of the Most High. The canons of reality, under which sense impressions are reduced to objective fact and so become available for use, and under which, again, facts are put in practice and turned to technological account, are the same canons of invidious distinction that rule in the world of property and among men occupied with predatory and pecuniary precedence. In effect men and things come to be rated in terms of what they (putatively) are--their intrinsic character--rather than in terms of what they (empirically) will do.