The inanimate factors which early man has to turn to account as a condition precedent to any appreciable advance in the industrial arts, outside of husbandry and of the use of fruits and fibres associated with it, do not lend themselves to an effectual approximation from the anthropomorphic side. Flint and similar minerals are refractory, they have no spiritual nature and no scheme or cycle of life that can be interpreted in some passable fashion as the outcome of instinctive propensities and workmanlike management. Anthropomorphic insight does not penetrate into the secret ways of brute matter, for all the reasonable concession to idiosyncracies, to recondite conceits, occult means and devious methods, with which unsophisticated man stands ready to meet them. He can see as far into a millstone as anyone along that line; but that is not far enough to be of any use, and he is debarred by his workmanlike common sense from systematically looking into the matter along any other line. It is only the blindfold, unsystematic accretions of opaque fact coming in, disjointed and unsympathetic, from the inhuman side of his technological experience that can help him out here. And experience of that kind can come upon him only inadvertently, for he has no basis on which to systematise these facts as they come, and so he has no means of intelligently seeking them. His intelligent endeavours to get at the nature of things will perforce go on the mass of knowledge which his intelligence has already comprehended, which is a knowledge of human conduct. Anthropomorphism is almost wholly obstructive in this field of brute matter, and in early times, before much in the way of accumulated matter-of-fact knowledge had forced itself upon men, the propensity to a teleological interpretation seems to have been nearly decisive against technological progress in the primary and indispensable mechanic arts. And in later phases of culture, where anthropomorphic interpretations of workmanship have been worked out into a rounded system of magic and religion, they have at times brought the technological advance to a full stop, particularly on the mechanical side, and have even led to the cancelment of gains that should have seemed secure.