n, but rather to illustrate the method and trend of the
leisure-class influence in education, a survey of certain salient
features of the higher learning, such as may serve this purpose, is all
that will be attempted.

In point of derivation and early development, learning is somewhat
closely related to the devotional function of the community,
particularly to the body of observances in which the service rendered
the supernatural leisure class expresses itself. The service by which it
is sought to conciliate supernatural agencies in the primitive cults is
not an industrially profitable employment of the community's time and
effort. It is, therefore, in great part, to be classed as a vicarious
leisure performed for the supernatural powers with whom negotiations
are carried on and whose good-will the service and the professions of
subservience are conceived to procure. In great part, the early learning
consisted in an acquisition of knowledge and facility in the service of
a supernatural agent. It was therefore closely analogous in character to
the training required for the domestic service of a temporal master. To
a great extent, the knowledge acquired under the priestly teachers of
the primitive community was knowledge of ritual and ceremonial; that
is to say, a knowledge of the most proper, most effective, or most
acceptable manner of approaching and of serving the preternatural
agents. What was learned was how to make oneself indispensable to these
powers, and so to put oneself in a position to ask, or even to require,
their intercession in the course of events or their abstention from
interference in any given enterprise. Propitiation was the end, and this
end was sought, in great part, by acquiring facility in subservience.
It appears to have been only gradually that other elements than those
of efficient service of the master found their way into the stock of
priestly or shamanistic instruction.

The priestly servitor of the inscrutable powers that move in the
external world came to stand in the position of a mediator between these
powers and the common run of unrestricted humanity; for he was possessed
of a knowledge of the supernatural etiquette which would admit him into
the presence. And as commonly happens with mediators between the vulgar
and their masters, whether the masters be natural or preternatural, he
found it expedient to have the means at hand tangibly to impress upon
the vulgar the fact that these