304 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [FT. it 



progress. The savage, with his small and undeveloped cere 

 brum, plays all summer, like the grasshopper in the fable, eat 

 ing and wasting whatever he can get ; for although he knows 

 that the dreaded winter is coming, during which he must starve 

 and shiver, he is nevertheless unable to realize these distant 

 feelings with sufficient force to determine his volition in the 

 presence of his actual feeling of repugnance to toil But 

 the civilized man, with his large and complex cerebrum, has 

 BO keen a sense of remote contingencies that he willingly 

 submits to long years of drudgery, in order to avoid poverty 

 in old age, pays out each year a portion of his hard-earned 

 money to provide for losses by fire which may never occur, 

 builds houses and accumulates fortunes for posterity to enjoy, 

 and now and then enacts laws to forestall possible disturb 

 ances or usurpations a century hence. Again, the progress 

 of scientific knowledge, familiarizing civilized man with the 

 idea of an inexorable regularity of sequence among events, 

 greatly assists him in the adjustment of his actions to far- 

 distant emergencies. He who ascribes certain kinds of suffer 

 ing to antecedent neglect of natural laws is more likelv to 



O^7 / 



shape his conduct so as to avoid a recurrence of the infliction, 

 than he who attributes the same kinds of suffering to the 

 wrath of an offended quasi-human Deity, and fondly hopes, 

 by ceremonial propitiation of the Deity, to escape in future. 



This power of shaping actions so as to meet future contin 

 gencies has been justly recognized by political economists as 

 an indispensable pre-requisite to the accumulation of wealth 

 in any community, without which no considerable degree 

 of progress can be attained. The impossibility of getting 

 barbarians to work, save under the stimulus of actually 

 present necessities, has been one of the chief obstacles in 

 the way of missionaries who have attempted to civilize triba] 

 communities. The Jesuits, in the seventeenth century, were 

 the most successful of Christian missionaries, and their pro 

 ceedings with the Indians of Paraguay constitute one of the 



