But through the centuries of its earlier growth the handicraft industry, simply as a routine of workmanship, shaped the conditions of life for the common people more pervasively and consistently than any other one factor. Its discipline, therefore, was of protracted duration and touched the current habits of thought in an intimate and enduring fashion; so as to leave a large and enduring effect on the institutions of the peoples among whom it prevailed. The English-speaking community shows these effects in a larger measure and a more evident manner than any other,--visible only in a less degree in the Low Countries, and more equivocally in the Scandinavian countries. These peoples had not been subjected to the handicraft discipline for a longer time or in a more exacting fashion than their Continental neighbours, but they had on the other hand escaped the full measure of the political activity of the era of statemaking that did so much to neutralise the effects of the handicraft system in the larger Continental countries. * * * * * Something has been said above of the way in which the discipline of life under the rule of handicraft shaped and coloured men’s thinking in those materialistic sciences whose early growth runs parallel with the technological advance in modern times. It has also been evident that this training in the manner of conceiving things for the purposes of technology wrought certain broad changes in the theological and philosophical conceptions that guided the inquiring spirits of the same and subsequent generations. This effect wrought by the routine of life under the handicraft system on scientific and philosophical conceptions is of a very pervasive character, being of the nature of an habitual bent, an attitude or frame of mind, whose characteristic mark is the acceptance of creative workmanship as a finality. It became an element of common sense in the apprehension of thoughtful men whose frame of mind was formed under the traditions of that era that creative workmanship is an ultimate, irreducible factor in the constitution of things, accepted as a matter of course and used unsparingly and with ever-growing conviction as a _terminus a quo_ and _ad quem_.[135]