Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 26:101 (Jan 1869)
Article: The Natural Theology Of Social Science
Author: John Bascom

BSac 26:101 (Jan 1869) p. 120

The Natural Theology Of Social Science

Rev. John Bascom

No. V. Exchange And Currency

One of the striking features of man is the multiplicity of his desires. There is truly no limit to them. The increase in the number and kinds of internal impulses, when human life is compared with any form of brute life, is very great. Alike significant is the fact of the very limited ability of each individual to gratify these wishes. The circle of attainment is expanded in man to dimensions of which we have no previous prophecy, while the direct organic means of acquisition—the physical weapons of offence and defence and nutrition — seem rather to have fallen away than to have been enlarged.

The most rapacious hunger of the brute is simple in its claims, easily lapses into entire satiety, and comes to the

BSac 26:101 (Jan 1869) p. 121

labor of provision, armed with senses, weapons, and powers that ordinarily make of sustenance a light task. The impulse is simple and direct, the means present and adequate, and the pressure for new devises slight.

The number and variety of man’s wants, their tendency to indefinite expansion under the encouragement of gratification, taken with the feebleness of his physical powers, indicate at once an entirely new claim for thought, for a combination and thus for a division of labor hardly hinted at elsewhere. Man’s personal power to gratify his wishes is so disproportionate to the diversity of pleasures he covets, and to their difficulty of attainment, that we are surprised that his exertions can, even in connection with all the mechanism of civilized society, be made to play such a part in the great productive processes and circuits of the world, as to compensate the variety of toil represented in his food and clothing, in his means of shelter, of comfort, luxury, intellectual and spiritual enjoyment. In a single manufacture in which many are engaged, and whose joint products are divided among the laborers, there is in the share of each a great increase of the fruits of labor. The larger the number of persons, and the more the machinery employed, the more marked is the multiplication; but when the individual makes his toil a constituent of that of the whole civilized world, when he divides labor not merely with individuals but with nations, races, and zones, his portion of the proceeds, his dividend, assumes astonishing dimensions and variety. The produce of all climates, the products of all skill are represented in it, and he bears away, as the just equivalent of his own simple, single form of labor, a wealth that would be fabulous if computed in the exertion its direct attainment would have cost him. Nor is this true of one only, it is true of all who stand in the productive circle,...