THE MILITANT TYPE OF SOCIETY. 599 



than by established routine. Slaves can do only what they 

 are told by their masters ; their masters cannot do anything 

 that is unusual without official permission ; and no permission 

 is to be obtained from the local authority until superior autho 

 rities through their ascending grades have been consulted. 

 Hence the mental state generated is that of passive accept 

 ance 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 110 other agencies : the prompting ideas and sentiments 

 having been obliterated. 



There must be added a concomitant influence on the intel 

 lectual nature, which cooperates with the moral influences 

 just named. Personal causation is alone recognized, and the 

 conception of impersonal causation is prevented from develop 

 ing. The primitive man has no idea of cause in the modern 

 sense. The only agents included in his theory of tilings are 

 living persons and the ghosts of dead persons. All unusual 

 occurrences, together with those usual ones liable to variation, 

 he ascribes to supernatural beings. And this system of inter 

 pretation 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 maintain 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 physical cause arise and develop. 

 Consequently, by discouraging industrial progress, militancy 

 checks the replacing of ideas of personal agency by ideas of 



