20 
MALLERY. 
aclysms. These storms were but incidents in the grand 
economy and were factors of little moment compared with 
the ages of sunshine, of dew, and of gentle rain. So, like¬ 
wise, the mutual contentions of religions and of the men who 
believed in them and fought for them, have not directly ad¬ 
vanced man’s culture, but have been incident to and neces¬ 
sary evils attending its advance. Whatever good has been 
done by the champions of belief has been done for the most 
part in their own despite. The crusaders inflicted a heavy 
blow on the system which they sought to perpetuate, and 
the Mormons had no intent to provide a mid-continental 
station to benefit the Gentiles, whom they hated and sought 
to escape from by an exodus which in heroic faith rivals 
that of the Children of Israel. 
The evolution from savagery to civilization has brought 
forth many religions, and all of them have inflamed zealots 
who have represented the fevers to which humanity seems 
subject. But normal and lasting growth is by health, not 
by disease, by slow accretion, not by the spasmodic violence 
of insanity. The disturbances which are relied upon to sup¬ 
port the proposition in question were not causes, but some¬ 
times were symptoms, and more frequently were sequences 
or, in medical language, sequelse. 
When the actions of an individual make obvious his pos¬ 
session by a belief contrary to the reason of the majority, the 
latter employs one of the designating terms craze, crank, 
hobby, or fad, selected in proportion to the importance of 
the contrariety. When large bodies of individuals have 
been similarly affected and their numbers have gained such 
success as to become conspicuous, history, which is the ver¬ 
dict of the majority after the fact, decides that their belief 
was false and their action wrong. Philosophy always should 
be and often has been able to give the same decision in ad¬ 
vance of the recorded result. 
As regards the perficient work done by Philosophy, one of 
the least important of the instances in which its teachings 
do present good is that they discourage the activity of those 
