For the purpose in hand it is unnecessary to look more closely into the
psychological process or the ethnological line of descent by which the
later of these two animistic apprehensions of propensity is derived
from the earlier. This question may be of the gravest importance to
folk-psychology or to the theory of the evolution of creeds and cults.
The same is true of the more fundamental question whether the two
are related at all as successive phases in a sequence of development.
Reference is here made to the existence of these questions only to
remark that the interest of the present discussion does not lie in that
direction. So far as concerns economic theory, these two elements or
phases of the belief in luck, or in an extra-causal trend or propensity
in things, are of substantially the same character. They have an
economic significance as habits of thought which affect the individual's
habitual view of the facts and sequences with which he comes in contact,
and which thereby affect the individual's serviceability for the
industrial purpose. Therefore, apart from all question of the beauty,
worth, or beneficence of any animistic belief, there is place for
a discussion of their economic bearing on the serviceability of the
individual as an economic factor, and especially as an industrial agent.
It has already been noted in an earlier connection, that in order to
have the highest serviceability in the complex industrial processes of
today, the individual must be endowed with the aptitude and the habit
of readily apprehending and relating facts in terms of causal sequence.
Both as a whole and in its details, the industrial process is a process
of quantitative causation. The "intelligence" demanded of the workman,
as well as of the director of an industrial process, is little else
than a degree of facility in the apprehension of and adaptation to a
quantitatively determined causal sequence. This facility of apprehension
and adaptation is what is lacking in stupid workmen, and the growth
of this facility is the end sought in their education--so far as their
education aims to enhance their industrial efficiency.
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