Closely bound up with this correlation of anthropomorphism and prowess
is the fact that anthropomorphic cults act to conserve, if not to
initiate, habits of mind favorable to a regime of status. As regards
this point, it is quite impossible to say where the disciplinary effect
of the cult ends and where the evidence of a concomitance of variations
in inherited traits begins. In their finest development, the predatory
temperament, the sense of status, and the anthropomorphic cult all
together belong to the barbarian culture; and something of a mutual
causal relation subsists between the three phenomena as they come into
sight in communities on that cultural level. The way in which they recur
in correlation in the habits and attitudes of individuals and classes
today goes far to imply a like causal or organic relation between the
same psychological phenomena considered as traits or habits of the
individual. It has appeared at an earlier point in the discussion
that the relation of status, as a feature of social structure, is a
consequence of the predatory habit of life. As regards its line
of derivation, it is substantially an elaborated expression of the
predatory attitude. On the other hand, an anthropomorphic cult is a
code of detailed relations of status superimposed upon the concept of
a preternatural, inscrutable propensity in material things. So that, as
regards the external facts of its derivation, the cult may be taken as
an outgrowth of archaic man's pervading animistic sense, defined and in
some degree transformed by the predatory habit of life, the result being
a personified preternatural agency, which is by imputation endowed with
a full complement of the habits of thought that characterize the man of
the predatory culture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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