Any predisposition freely to accept and use the deliverances of sensible perception on their own recognisances simply, in the terms in which they come, and to connect them up in a system of knowledge in their own terms, without imputation of a spiritual (anthropomorphic) substratum,--for the purposes of workmanship such a predisposition should be of the first importance for effective work in the mechanic arts; and a strong instinctive bias to the contrary should be correspondingly pernicious. Any instinctive bias to colour, distort and derange the facts by imputing elements of human nature will unavoidably act to hinder and deflect the agent from an effectual pursuit of mechanical design. But the like is not true in the same degree as regards men’s dealings with animate nature. Anthropomorphic interpretation is more at home and less disserviceable here. With less serious derangement in the objective results, plants and animals may be construed to have a conscious purpose in life and to pursue their ends somewhat after the human fashion; witness the facility with which the story-tellers recount plausible episodes (feigned or real) from the life of animals and plants, and the readiness with which such tales get a hearing. Readers and hearers find no great difficulty, if any, in giving make-believe credence to the tales so long as they recount only such adventures as are physically possible to the animals of which (whom?) they are told; the hearers are always ready to go with the story-teller down this highway of make-believe into the subhuman fairy land. Mechanical phenomena, happenings in the mechanic arts, characteristics of the existence of inanimate objects and the changes which they undergo, lend themselves with much less happy effect to the anthropomorphic story-teller’s make-believe. Episodes from the feigned life-history of tools, machines and raw materials are not drawn on with anything like the same frequency, nor do the tales that recount them meet with the same untiring attention. There is always an unreality about them which even the most robust make-believe can overcome only for a short and doubtful interval. Witness the relative barrenness of primitive folk-tales on this inanimate side, as compared with the exuberance of the myths and legends that interpret the life of plants and animals; and where inanimate phenomena are drawn into the net of personation it happens almost unavoidably that a feigned person is thrown into the foreground of the tale plausibly to take the part of bearer, controller or intrigant in the episodes related.[43]