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the most necessary arts of life.  Nature has furnished the inferior animals with many and powerful instincts to direct them in the choice of their food, and with natural instruments peculiarly adapted to enable them, either by climbing the forest tree for its fruits, or by digging in the earth for nutricious roots, to obtain it, in sufficient quantities for the sustenance of life.  But man, destitute of the nice and accurate instincts of other animals, as well as of the effectual means which thy possess of procuring their provision, must have been the most forlorn of all creatures, although destined to be lord of the creation; unless we can suppose him, like the primitive man of the sacred scriptures, to have been placed in a rich garden which offered him, at hand, its abundant and spontaneous fruits.  Cast out, an orphan pf nature, naked and helpless, into the savage forest, he must have perished before he could have learned how to supply his most immediate and urgent wants.  Suppose him to have been created, or to have started into being, we know not how, in the full strength of his bodily powers, how long must it have been before he could have known the proper use of his limbs, or how to apply them to climb the tree, and run out upon its limbs to gather its fruit, or to grope in the earth for 


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roots, to the choice of which he could not be led by his smell, and for the collection of which the human hand, especially in its soft, and original state, is most imperfectly adapted.  Very inadequate mist have been the supply obtained by these means, if a supply could have been obtained at all, for wants the most pressing and importunate in our nature, and for appetites the calls of which, in such a state, wherein its supplies must always be both scanty, and difficult to be procured, could never be intermitted.  We are prone to judge of the mental powers of such a being, in the first moments of his existence, by the faculties which we perceive in ourselves, or observe among savages with whom we are acquainted, whose minds have been, in a degree, improved and strengthened by experience.  The American savage, for example, has been taught from his infancy the necessary arts for supplying his wants.  But the primitive man, if we suppose him to have received no communication of knowledge from his Creator, and to have been abandoned merely to his own powers, without the least aid from experience, or instruction, would have been nothing but a large infant.  Reason, the supreme prerogative of our nature, and its chief distinction from that of the inferior animals, could have 

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-katatatatoo ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-06-05 07:49:55