are marked by improvidence, waste, and carelessness, out of which
prudence, foresight, patience, and perseverance are developed
slowly, by pain and loss, as experience is accumulated, and
knowledge increases also, as better methods seem worth while. The
consequences of error and the effects of luck were always mixed.
As we have seen, the ills of life were connected with the
displeasure of the ghosts. _Per contra_, conduct which conformed
to the will of the ghosts was goodness, and was supposed to bring
blessing and prosperity. Thus a correlation was established, in
the faith of men, between goodness and happiness, and on that
correlation an art of happiness was built. It consisted in a
faithful performance of rites of respect towards superior powers
and in the use of lucky times, places, words, etc., with
avoidance of unlucky ones. All uncivilized men demand and expect
a specific response. Inasmuch as they did not get it, and indeed
the art of happiness always failed of results, the great question
of world philosophy always has been, What is the real relation
between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few
generations that men have found courage to say that there is
none. The whole strength of the notion that they are correlated
is in the opposite experience which proves that no evil thing
brings happiness. The oldest religious literature consists of
formulas of worship and prayer by which devotion and obedience
were to produce satisfaction of the gods, and win favor and
prosperity for men.[5] The words "ill" and "evil" have never yet
thrown off the ambiguity between wickedness and calamity. The two
ideas come down to us allied or combined. It was the rites which
were the object of tradition, not the ideas which they
embodied.[6]

+10. Illustrations.+ The notions of blessing and curse are
subsequent explanations by men of great cases of prosperity or
calamity which came to their knowledge. Then the myth-building
imagination invented stories of great virtue or guilt to account
for the prosperity or calamity.[7] The Greek notion of the
Nemesis was an inference from observation of good and ill fortune
in life. Great popular interest attached to the stories of
Croesus and Polycrates. The latter, after all his glory and
prosperity, was crucified by the satrap of Lydia. Croesus had
done all that man