days and in the more archaic culturaJ regions, the structure o( conventionally accepted truths and the body of accredited spiritual or eilra-materlal lacU are more comprehensive and rigid, and the thinking on all topics is more consistently held to tests of authenticity as contnisi«d with i«ats of sense perception. On the whole, the number and variety of things that ate fundamentally and eternally true and good increase as one goes outward from the modeni West-European cultural centres Into the earUer barbarian past or into the remoter barbanan preMuu
extreme conservatism. Conservatism means the mainteriance of conventions already in force. On this head, therefore, the discipline of modem busineas life may be said simply to retain something of the complesion which marks the life of the higher barbarian culture, at the same time that it has not retained the disciplinary force of the barbarian culture in so high a state of preservation as some of the other occupations just named.
The discipline of the modem industrial employments is relatively free from the bias of conventionality, but the difference between the mechanical and the business occupations in this respect is a difference of degree. It is not simply that conventional standards of certainty fall into abeyance for lack of exercise, among the industrial classes. The positive discipline exercised by their work in good part runs counter to the habit of thinking in conventional, anthropomorphic terms, whether the conventionality is that of natural rights or any other. And in respect of this positive training away from conventional norms, there is a large divergence between the several lines of industrial employment. In proportion as a given line of employment has more of the character of a mtkchine process and less of the character of handicraft, the matter-of-fact training which it gives is more pronounced. In a sense more intimate than the inventors of the phrase seem to have