THE MILITANT TYPE OF SOCIETY, 771 



evidences of his regulative action over men's lives ; and these gener- 

 ate the idea that his power is boundless. Unlimited faith in govern- 

 mental agency is fostered. Generations brought up under a system 

 which controls all affairs, private and public, tacitly assume that af- 

 fairs can only thus be controlled. Those who have experience of no 

 other regime become iinable to imagine any other rec/hne. In such 

 societies as that of ancient Peru, for example, where, as we have seen, 

 regimental rule was universal, there were no materials for framing 

 the thought of an industrial life spontaneously carried on and spon- 

 taneously regulated. 



By implication, there result repression of individual initiative and 

 a consequent lack of private enterprise. In proportion as an army 

 becomes organized it is reduced to a state in w^hich the independent 

 action of its members is forbidden. And, in proportion as regimenta- 

 tion pervades the society at large, each member of it, directed or re- 

 strained at every turn, has little or no power of conducting his busi- 

 ness otherwise than by established routine. Slaves can do only what 

 they are told by their masters ; their masters can not do anything that 

 is unusual without official permission ; and no permission is to be 

 obtained from the local authority until superior authorities through 

 their ascending grades have been consulted. Hence the mental state 

 generated is that of passive acceptance and expectancy. Where the 

 militant type is fully developed, everything must be done by public 

 agencies ; not only for the reason that these occupy all spheres, but 

 for the further reason that, did they not occupy them, there would 

 arise no other agencies the prompting ideas and sentiments having 

 been obliterated. 



There must be added a concomitant influence on the intellectual 

 nature which cooperates with the moral influences just named. Per- 

 sonal causation is alone recognized, and the conception of impersonal 

 causation is prevented from developing. The primitive man has no 

 idea of cause in the modern sense. The only agents included in his 

 theory of things are living persons and the ghosts of dead persons. 

 All unusual occurrences, together with those usual ones liable to vari- 

 ation, he ascribes to supernatural beings. And this system of inter- 

 pretration survives through early stages of civilization ; as we see, for 

 example, among the Homeric Greeks, by whom wounds, deaths, and 

 escapes in battle, were ascribed to the enmity or the aid of the gods, 

 and by whom good and bad acts were held to be divinely prompted. 

 Continuance and development of militant forms and activities main- 

 tain this way of thinking. In the first place it indirectly hinders the 

 discovery of causal relations. The sciences grow out of the arts 

 begin as generalizations of truths which practice of the arts makes 

 manifest. In proportion as processes of production multiply in their 

 kinds and increase in their complexities, more numerous uniformities 

 come to be recognized ; and the ideas of necessary relation and physi- 



