GENESIS OF MAN, INTELLECTUALLY 



rivers the traveller continually meets with little 

 floating farms constructed upon rafts and held 

 in place by anchors. Yet side by side with these 

 elaborate but fragile structures are to be seen 

 acres of swamp land which only need a few 

 years of careful draining to become permanently 

 fit for tillage. So incapable are the Chinese of 

 adapting their actions to sequences at all remote, 

 that they continue, age after age, to resort to 

 such temporary devices, rather than to bestow 

 their labour where its fruits, however enduring, 

 cannot be enjoyed from the outset.^ The con- 

 jtrast proves that the cause is the intellectual in- 

 fability to realize vividly a group of future con- 

 ditions, involving benefits not immediately to 

 be felt. 



Of the correspondence in time, even more 

 forcibly than of the correspondence in space, it 

 may be said that its extension during the pro- 

 cess of social evolution has been much greater 

 than during the organic evolution of the human 

 race from some ancestral primate. Between the 

 Australian, on the one hand, who cannot esti- 

 mate the length of a month, or provide even 

 for certain disaster which does not stare him in 

 the face, and whose theory of things is adapted 

 only to events which occur during his own life- 

 time, — and, on the other hand, the European, 

 with his practical foresight, his elaborate scien- 

 ^ See Mill, Political Economy , Book I. chap. xi. 



77 



