GENESIS OF MAN, INTELLECTUALLY 



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, familiariz- 

 ing 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 cer- 

 tain kinds of suffering to antecedent neglect of 

 natural laws is more likely to shape his conduct 

 so as to avoid a recurrence of the infliction, than 

 he who attributes the same kinds of sufl^ering 

 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 contingencies has been justly recognized 

 by political economists as an indispensable pre- 

 requisite to the accumulation of wealth in any 

 community, without which no considerable de- 

 gree of progress can be attained. The impossi- 

 bility 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 

 tribal communities. The Jesuits, in the seven- 

 teenth century, were the most successful of 

 Christian missionaries, and their proceedings 

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