COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



Fuegian present exclaimed, " Oh, Mr. Bynoe, 

 rain much, much wind, blow much ! " thus in- 

 dicating his belief that the wasting of food, con- 

 demned by tribal rules, would be visited with 

 condign punishment by the tutelar deities of the 

 tribe. " This transfigured form of restraint," 

 says Mr. Spencer, " differing at first but little 

 from the original form, is capable of immense 

 development." As the fetishistic agencies are 

 generalized into the deities of polytheism, and 

 these in time are summed up in a single an- 

 thropomorphic deity, there slowly grows up the 

 theory of a hell in which actions condemned by 

 the community will be punished. The complex 

 conceptions of good and evil are thus so widely 

 differentiated from the simpler conceptions of 

 pleasure and pain, that the traces of the original 

 kinship are obscured. This kind of restraint 

 has not ceased to operate upon numbers of 

 civilized men at the present day ; and theolo- 

 gians tell us that, if it were removed, there would 

 ensue a moral retrogression. So doubtless there 

 would, if it could be removed prematurely. 



Returning to our savage, it must be observed 

 that these combined agencies have enforced 

 upon him an amount of self-restraint, in view 

 of tribal sanctions, which differentiates him 

 widely from any gregarious animal. Savages 

 are not unfrequently capable of extreme devo- 

 tion and self-sacrifice when the interests of the 

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