The industrial disability entailed by a popular adherence to one of the higher anthropomorphic cults may be relatively slight, but it is not to be overlooked.

And even these high-class cults of the Western culture do not represent the last dissolving phase of this human sense of extra-causal propensity.

Beyond these the same animistic sense shows itself also in such attenuations of anthropomorphism as the eighteenth-century appeal to an order of nature and natural rights, and in their modern representative, the ostensibly post-Darwinian concept of a meliorative trend in the process of evolution.

This animistic explanation of phenomena is a form of the fallacy which the logicians knew by the name of ignava ratio.

For the purposes of industry or of science it counts as a blunder in the apprehension and valuation of facts.