the regions of light, deadens the energies, paralyzes all tendency
toward advancement, and at the least struggle a man gives up without
fighting. If by one of those rare accidents, some wild spirit, that
is, some active one, excels, instead of his example stimulating, it
only causes others to persist in their inaction. 'There's one who will
work for us: let's sleep on!' say his relatives and friends. True it
is that the spirit of rivalry is sometimes awakened, only that then
it awakens with bad humor in the guise of envy, and instead of being
a lever for helping, it is an obstacle that produces discouragement.

Nurtured by the example of anchorites of a contemplative and lazy
life, the natives spend theirs in giving their gold to the Church
in the hope of miracles and other wonderful things. Their will is
hypnotized: from childhood they learn to act mechanically, without
knowledge of the object, thanks to the exercises imposed upon them
from the tenderest years of praying for whole hours in an unknown
tongue, of venerating things that they do not understand, of accepting
beliefs that are not explained to them to having absurdities imposed
upon them, while the protests of reason are repressed. Is it any
wonder that with this vicious dressage of intelligence and will the
native, of old logical and consistent--as the analysis of his
past and of his language demonstrates--should now be a mass of
dismal contradictions? That continual struggle between reason and
duty, between his organism and his new ideals, that civil war which
disturbs the peace of his conscience all his life, has the result, of
paralyzing all his energies, and aided by the severity of the climate,
makes of that eternal vacillation, of the doubts in his brain, the
origin of his indolent disposition.

"You can't know more than this or that old man!" "Don't aspire to