So, on the other hand, as an illustration from the side of technology, to show how matters stood in this connection through the best days of anthropomorphism, fire had been in daily and indispensable use through an indefinite series of millennia before men, in the early modern times of Occidental civilisation, learned the use of a chimney. And all that hindered the discovery of this simple mechanical expedient seems to have been the fatal propensity of men to impute a teleological nature and workmanlike design to this phenomenon with which no truce or working arrangement can be negotiated in spiritual terms.[51] * * * * * A doubt may plausibly suggest itself as to the competency of such an explanation of these phenomena. It would seem scarcely to lie in the nature of an instinct of workmanship to enlist the workman in the acquisition of knowledge which he cannot use, and guide him in elaborating it into a system which will defeat his own ends; to build up obstructions to its own working, and yet in the long run to overcome them. In part this discrepancy in the outcome arises from the fact that the sense of workmanship affords a norm of systematisation for the facts that come into knowledge. This leads to something like a dramatisation of the facts, whereby they fall into some sort of a sequence of conduct among themselves, become personalised, are conceived as gifted with discrimination, inclinations, preferences and initiative; and in so far as the facts are conceived to be involved in immaterial or hyperphysical relations of this character they cannot effectually be made use of for the purposes of technology. All conceptions that exceed the scope of material fact are useless for technology, and in so far as such conceptions are intruded into the body of information drawn on by the workman they become obstructive.