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ALSO BY _CLARENCE DAY_

THE CROW'S NEST
THOUGHTS WITHOUT WORDS
GOD AND MY FATHER
IN THE GREEN MOUNTAIN COUNTRY
SCENES FROM THE MESOZOIC
LIFE WITH FATHER




THIS SIMIAN _WORLD_



_by_

CLARENCE DAY



_With Illustrations by the Author_



_New York & London_
ALFRED·A·KNOPF
1936

COPYRIGHT 1920, BY CLARENCE DAY

_All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a
reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a
magazine or newspaper._

_Published May 22, 1920_
_Reprinted Nine Times_
_Eleventh Printing, March, 1936_

_Manufactured in the United States of America_




"How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation,' with an ugly
emphasis on _brute_.... As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with
other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to
think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees,
and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly
and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange
these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?"

W. N. P. BARBELLION.




_THIS SIMIAN WORLD_




_ONE_


Last Sunday, Potter took me out driving along upper Broadway, where
those long rows of tall new apartment houses were built a few years
ago. It was a mild afternoon and great crowds of people were out.
Sunday afternoon crowds. They were not going anywhere,--they were just
strolling up and down, staring at each other, and talking. There were
thousands and thousands of them.

"Awful, aren't they!" said Potter.

I didn't know what he meant. When he added, "Why, these crowds," I
turned and asked, "Why, what about them?" I wasn't sure whether he had
an idea or a headache.

"Other creatures don't do it," he replied, with a discouraged
expression. "Are any other beings ever found in such masses, but
vermin? Aimless, staring, vacant-minded,--look at them! I can get no
sense whatever of individual worth, or of value in men as a race, when
I see them like this. It makes one almost despair of civilization."

I thought this over for awhile, to get in touch with his attitude. I
myself feel differently at different times about us human-beings:
sometimes I get pretty indignant when we are attacked (for there is
altogether too much abuse of us by spectator philosophers) and yet at
other times I too feel like a spectator, an alien: but even then I had
never felt so alien or despairing as Potter. I cast about for the
probable cause of our difference. "Let's remember," I said, "it's a
simian civilization."

Potter was staring disgustedly at some vaudeville sign-boards.

"Yes," I said, "those for example are distinctively simian. Why should
you feel disappointment at something inevitable?" And I went on to
argue that it wasn't as though we were descended from eagles for
instance, instead of (broadly speaking) from ape-like or monkeyish
beings. Being of simian stock, we had simian traits. Our development
naturally bore the marks of our origin. If we had inherited our
dispositions from eagles we should have loathed vaudeville. But as
cousins of the Bandarlog, we loved it. What could you expect?

[Illustration: Descended from eagles]




_TWO_


If we had been made directly from clay, the way it says in the Bible,
and had therefore inherited no intermediate characteristics,--if a god,
or some principle of growth, had gone that way to work with us, he or
it might have molded us into much more splendid forms.

But considering our simian descent, it has done very well. The only
people who are disappointed in us are those who still believe that clay
story. Or who--unconsciously--still let it color their thinking.

                     *      *      *      *      *

There certainly seems to be a power at work in the world, by virtue of
which every living thing grows and develops. And it tends toward
splendor. Seeds become trees, and weak little nations grow great. But
the push or the force that is doing this, the yeast as it were, has to
work in and on certain definite kinds of material. Because this yeast
is in us, there may be great and undreamed of possibilities awaiting
mankind; but because of our line of descent there are also queer
limitations.




[Illustration: Strange forgotten dynasties]

_THREE_


In those distant invisible epochs before men existed, before even the
proud missing link strutted around through the woods (little realizing
how we his greatgrandsons would smile wryly at him, much as our own
descendants may shudder at us, ages hence) the various animals were
desperately competing for power. They couldn't or didn't live as
equals. Certain groups sought the headship.

Many strange forgotten dynasties rose, met defiance, and fell. In the
end it was our ancestors who won, and became simian kings, and
bequeathed a whole planet to us--and have never been thanked for it. No
monument has been raised to the memory of those first hairy conquerors;
yet had they not fought well and wisely in those far-off times, some
other race would have been masters, and kept us in cages, or shot us
for sport in the forests while they ruled the world.

                     *      *      *      *      *

So Potter and I, developing this train of thought, began to imagine we
had lived many ages ago, and somehow or other had alighted here from
some older planet. Familiar with the ways of evolution elsewhere in the
universe, we naturally should have wondered what course it would take
on this earth. "Even in this out-of-the-way corner of the Cosmos," we
might have reflected, "and on this tiny star, it may be of interest to
consider the trend of events." We should have tried to appraise the
different species as they wandered around, each with its own set of
good and bad characteristics. Which group, we'd have wondered, would
ever contrive to rule all the rest?

And how great a development could they attain to thereafter?




_FOUR_


If we had landed here after the great saurians had been swept from the
scene, we might first have considered the lemurs or apes. They had
hands. Aesthetically viewed, the poor simians were simply grotesque;
but travelers who knew other planets might have known what beauty may
spring from an uncouth beginning in this magic universe.

Still--those frowzy, unlovely hordes of apes and monkeys were so
completely lacking in signs of kingship; they were so flighty, too, in
their ways, and had so little purpose, and so much love for absurd and
idle chatter, that they would have struck us, we thought, as unlikely
material. Such traits, we should have reminded ourselves, persist. They
are not easily left behind, even after long stages; and they form a
terrible obstacle to all high advancement.




_FIVE_


The bees or the ants might have seemed to us more promising. Their
smallness of size was not necessarily too much of a handicap. They
could have made poison their weapon for the subjugation of rivals. And
in these orderly insects there was obviously a capacity for labor, and
co-operative labor at that, which could carry them far. We all know
that they have a marked genius: great gifts of their own. In a
civilization of super-ants or bees, there would have been no problem of
the hungry unemployed, no poverty, no unstable government, no riots, no
strikes for short hours, no derision of eugenics, no thieves, perhaps
no crime at all.

Ants are good citizens: they place group interests first.

But they carry it so far, they have few or no political rights. An ant
doesn't have the vote, apparently: he just has his duties.

This quality may have something to do with their having group wars. The
egotism of their individual spirits is allowed scant expression, so the
egotism of the group is extremely ferocious and active. Is this one of
the reasons why ants fight so much? They go in for State Socialism,
yes, but they are not internationalists. And ants commit atrocities in
and after their battles that are--I wish I could truly say--inhuman.

But conversely, ants are absolutely unselfish within the community.
They are skilful. Ingenious. Their nests and buildings are relatively
larger than man's. The scientists speak of their paved streets, vaulted
halls, their hundreds of different domesticated animals, their pluck
and intelligence, their individual initiative, their chaste and
industrious lives. Darwin said the ant's brain was "one of the most
marvelous atoms in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of
man"--yes, of present-day man, who for thousands and thousands of years
has had so much more chance to develop his brain.... A thoughtful
observer would have weighed all these excellent qualities.

When we think of these creatures as little men (which is all wrong of
course) we see they have their faults. To our eyes they seem too
orderly, for instance. Repressively so. Their ways are more fixed than
those of the old Egyptians, and their industry is painful to think of,
it's hyper-Chinese. But we must remember this is a simian comment. The
instincts of the species that you and I belong to are of an opposite
kind; and that makes it hard for us to judge ants fairly.

But we and the ants are alike in one matter: the strong love of
property. And instead of merely struggling with Nature for it, they
also fight other ants. The custom of plunder seems to be a part of most
of their wars. This has gone on for ages among them, and continues
today. Raids, ferocious combats, and loot are part of an ant's regular
life. Ant reformers, if there were any, might lay this to their
property sense, and talk of abolishing property as a cure for the evil.
But that would not help for long unless they could abolish the love of
it.

Ants seem to care even more for property than we do ourselves. We men
are inclined to ease up a little when we have all we need. But it is
not so with ants: they can't bear to stop: they keep right on working.
This means that ants do not contemplate: they heed nothing outside of
their own little rounds. It is almost as though their fondness for
labor had closed fast their minds.

Conceivably they might have developed inquiring minds. But this would
have run against their strongest instincts. The ant is knowing and
wise; but he doesn't know enough to take a vacation. The worshipper of
energy is too physically energetic to see that he cannot explore
certain higher fields until he is still.

Even if such a race had somehow achieved self-consciousness and reason,
would they have been able therewith to rule their instincts, or to stop
work long enough to examine themselves, or the universe, or to dream of
any noble development? Probably not. Reason is seldom or never the
ruler: it is the servant of instinct. It would therefore have told the
ants that incessant toil was useful and good.

"Toil has brought you up from the ruck of things," Reason would have
plausibly said. "It's by virtue of feverish toil that you have become
what you are. Being endlessly industrious is the best road--for you--to
the heights." And, self-reassured, they would then have had orgies of
work; and thus, by devoted exertion, have blocked their advancement.
Work, and order and gain would have withered their souls.




_SIX_


Let us take the great cats. They are free from this talent for
slave-hood. Stately beasts like the lion have more independence of mind
than the ants,--and a self-respect, we may note, unknown to primates.
Or consider the leopards, with hearts that no tyrant could master. What
fearless and resolute leopard-men they could have fathered! How
magnificently such a civilization would have made its force tell!

A race of civilized beings descended from these great cats would have
been rich in hermits and solitary thinkers. The recluse would not have
been stigmatized as peculiar, as he is by us simians. They would not
have been a credulous people, or easily religious. False prophets and
swindlers would have found few dupes. And what generals they would have
made! what consummate politicians!

Don't imagine them as a collection of tigers walking around on their
hind-legs. They would have only been like tigers in the sense that we
men are like monkeys. Their development in appearance and character
would have been quite transforming.

Instead of the small flat head of the tiger, they would have had clear
smooth brows; and those who were not bald would have had neatly parted
hair--perhaps striped.

Their mouths would have been smaller and more sensitive: their faces
most dignified. Where now they express chiefly savageness, they would
have expressed fire and grace.

They would have been courteous and suave. No vulgar crowding would have
occurred on the streets of their cities. No mobs. No ignominious
subway-jams.

Imagine a cultivated coterie of such men and women, at a ball, dancing.
How few of us humans are graceful. They would have all been Pavlovas.

                     *      *      *      *      *

Like ants and bees, the cat race is nervous. Their temperaments are
high-strung. They would never have become as poised or as placid
as--say--super-cows. Yet they would have had less insanity, probably,
than we. Monkeys' (and elephants') minds seem precariously balanced,
unstable. The great cats are saner. They are intense, they would have
needed sanitariums: but fewer asylums. And their asylums would have
been not for weak-minded souls, but for furies.

They would have been strong at slander. They would have been far more
violent than we, in their hates, and they would have had fewer
friendships. Yet they might not have been any poorer in real
friendships than we. The real friendships among men are so rare that
when they occur they are famous. Friends as loyal as Damon and Pythias
were, are exceptions. Good fellowship is common, but unchanging
affection is not. We like those who like us, as a rule, and dislike
those who don't. Most of our ties have no better footing than that; and
those who have many such ties are called warm-hearted.

                     *      *      *      *      *

The super-cat-men would have rated cleanliness higher. Some of us
primates have learned to keep ourselves clean, but it's no large
proportion; and even the cleanest of us see no grandeur in
soap-manufacturing, and we don't look to manicures and plumbers for
social prestige. A feline race would have honored such occupations. J.
de Courcy Tiger would have felt that nothing _but_ making soap, or
being a plumber, was compatible with a high social position; and the
rich Vera Pantherbilt would have deigned to dine only with manicures.

None but the lowest dregs of such a race would have been lawyers
spending their span of life on this mysterious earth studying the long
dusty records of dead and gone quarrels. We simians naturally admire a
profession full of wrangle and chatter. But that is a monkeyish way of
deciding disputes, not a feline.

We fight best in armies, gregariously, where the risk is reduced; but
we disapprove usually of murderers, and of almost all private combat.
With the great cats, it would have been just the other way round.
(Lions and leopards fight each other singly, not in bands, as do
monkeys.)

As a matter of fact, few of us delight in really serious fighting. We
do love to bicker; and we box and knock each other around, to exhibit
our strength; but few normal simians are keen about bloodshed and
killing; we do it in war only because of patriotism, revenge, duty,
glory. A feline civilization would have cared nothing for duty or
glory, but they would have taken a far higher pleasure in gore. If a
planet of super-cat-men could look down upon ours, they would not know
which to think was the most amazing: the way we tamely live, five
million or so in a city, with only a few police to keep us quiet, while
we commit only one or two murders a day, and hardly have a respectable
number of brawls; or the way great armies of us are trained to
fight,--not liking it much, and yet doing more killing in war-time and
shedding more blood than even the fiercest lion on his cruelest days.
Which would perplex a gentlemanly super-cat spectator the more, our
habits of wholesale slaughter in the field, or our spiritless making a
fetish of "order," at home?

                     *      *      *      *      *

It is fair to judge peoples by the rights they will sacrifice most for.
Super-cat-men would have been outraged, had their right of personal
combat been questioned. The simian submits with odd readiness to the
loss of this privilege. What outrages him is to make him stop wagging
his tongue. He becomes most excited and passionate about the right of
free speech, even going so far in his emotion as to declare it is
sacred.

He looks upon other creatures pityingly because they are dumb. If one
of his own children is born dumb, he counts it a tragedy. Even that
mere hesitation in speech, known as stammering, he deems a misfortune.

So precious to a simian is the privilege of making sounds with his
tongue, that when he wishes to punish severely those men he calls
criminals, he forbids them to chatter, and forces them by threats to be
silent. It is felt that this punishment is entirely too cruel however,
and that even the worst offenders should be allowed to talk part of
each day.

Whatever a simian does, there must always be some talking about it. He
can't even make peace without a kind of chatter called a peace
conference. Super-cats would not have had to "make" peace: they would
have just walked off and stopped fighting.

                     *      *      *      *      *

In a world of super-cat-men, I suppose there would have been fewer
sailors; and people would have cared less for seaside resorts, or for
swimming. Cats hate getting wet, so men descended from them might have
hated it. They would have felt that even going in wading was a sign of
great hardihood, and only the most daring young fellows, showing off,
would have done it.

Among them there would have been no anti-vivisection societies:

No Young Cats Christian Associations or Red Cross work:

No vegetarians:

No early closing laws:

Much more hunting and trapping:

No riding to hounds; that's pure simian. Just think how it would have
entranced the old-time monkeys to foresee such a game! A game where
they'd all prance off on captured horses, tearing pell-mell through the
woods in gay red coats, attended by yelping packs of servant-dogs. It
is excellent sport--but how cats would scorn to hunt in that way!

They would not have knighted explorers--they would have all been
explorers.

                     *      *      *      *      *

Imagine that you are strolling through a super-cat city at night. Over
yonder is the business quarter, its evening shops blazing with jewels.
The great stock-yards lie to the east where you hear those sad sounds:
that low mooing as of innumerable herds, waiting slaughter. Beyond lie
the silent aquariums and the crates of fresh mice. (They raise mice
instead of hens in the country, in Super-cat Land.) To the west is a
beautiful but weirdly bacchanalian park, with long groves of catnip,
where young super-cats have their fling, and where a few crazed catnip
addicts live on till they die, unable to break off their strangely
undignified orgies. And here where you stand is the sumptuous residence
district. Houses with spacious grounds everywhere: no densely-packed
buildings. The streets have been swept up--or lapped up--until they are
spotless. Not a scrap of paper is lying around anywhere: no rubbish, no
dust. Few of the pavements are left bare, as ours are, and those few
are polished: the rest have deep soft velvet carpets. No footfalls are
heard.

[Illustration: Punctilious, haughty, inflammable]

There are no lights in these streets, though these people are abroad
much at night. All you see are stars overhead and the glowing eyes of
cat ladies, of lithe silken ladies who pass you, or of stiff-whiskered
men. Beware of those men and the gleam of their split-pupiled stare.
They are haughty, punctilious, inflammable: self-absorbed too, however.
They will probably not even notice you; but if they do, you are lost.
They take offense in a flash, abhor strangers, despise hospitality, and
would think nothing of killing you or me on their way home to dinner.

Follow one of them. Enter this house. Ah what splendor! No servants,
though a few abject monkeys wait at the back-doors, and submissively
run little errands. But of course they are never let inside: they would
seem out of place. Gorgeous couches, rich colors, silken walls, an
oriental magnificence. In here is the ballroom. But wait: what is this
in the corner? A large triumphal statue--of a cat overcoming a dog. And
look at this dining-room, its exquisite appointments, its daintiness:
faucets for hot and cold milk in the pantry, and a gold bowl of cream.

Some one is entering. Hush! If I could but describe her! Languorous,
slender and passionate. Sleepy eyes that see everything. An indolent
purposeful step. An unimaginable grace. If you were _her_ lover, my
boy, you would learn how fierce love can be, how capricious and sudden,
how hostile, how ecstatic, how violent!

                     *      *      *      *      *

Think what the state of the arts would have been in such cities.

They would have had few comedies on their stage; no farces. Cats care
little for fun. In the circus, superlative acrobats. No clowns.

[Illustration: One of their poets]

In drama and singing they would have surpassed us probably. Even in the
stage of arrested development as mere animals, in which we see cats,
they wail with a passionate intensity at night in our yards. Imagine
how a Caruso descended from such beings would sing.

In literature they would not have begged for happy endings.

They would have been personally more self-assured than we, far freer of
cheap imitativeness of each other in manners and art, and hence more
original in art; more clearly aware of what they really desired, not
cringingly watchful of what was expected of them; less widely observant
perhaps, more deeply thoughtful.

Their artists would have produced less however, even though they felt
more. A super-cat artist would have valued the pictures he drew for
their effects on himself; he wouldn't have cared a rap whether anyone
else saw them or not. He would not have bothered, usually, to give any
form to his conceptions. Simply to have had the sensation would have
for him been enough. But since simians love to be noticed, it does not
content them to have a conception; they must wrestle with it until it
takes a form in which others can see it. They doom the artistic impulse
to toil with its nose to the grindstone, until their idea is expressed
in a book or a statue. Are they right? I have doubts. The artistic
impulse seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly
deserts us half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, art is
labor. With the cats, art is joy.

                     *      *      *      *      *

But the dominant characteristic of this fine race is cunning. And hence
I think it would have been through their craftiness, chiefly, that they
would have felt the impulse to study, and the wish to advance. Craft is
a cat's delight: craft they never can have too much of. So it would
have been from one triumph of cunning to another that they would have
marched. That would have been the greatest driving force of their
civilization.

This would have meant great progress in invention and science--or in
some fields of science, the economic for instance. But it would have
retarded them in others. Craft studies the world calculatingly, from
without, instead of understandingly from within. Especially would it
have cheapened the feline philosophies; for not simply how to know but
how to circumvent the universe would have been their desire. Mankind's
curiosity is disinterested; it seems purer by contrast. That is to say,
made as we are, it seems purer to us. What we call disinterested,
however, super-cats might call aimless. (Aimlessness is one of the
regular simian traits.)

I don't mean to be prejudiced in favor of the simian side. Curiosity
may be as debasing, I grant you, as craft. And craft might turn into
artifices of a kind which would be noble and fine. Just as the ignorant
and fitful curiosity of some little monkey is hardly to be compared to
the astronomer's magnificent search, so the craft and cunning we see in
our pussies would bear small relation to the high-minded planning of
some ruler of the race we are imagining.

And yet--craft _is_ self-defeating in the end. Transmute it into its
finest possible form, let it be as subtle and civilized as you please,
as yearning and noble, as enlightened, it still sets itself over
against the wholeness of things; its rôle is that of the part at war
with the whole. Milton's Lucifer had the mind of a fine super-cat.

That craft may defeat itself in the end, however, is not the real
point. That doesn't explain why the lions aren't ruling the planet. The
trouble is, it would defeat itself in the beginning. It would have too
bitterly stressed the struggle for existence. Conflict and struggle
make civilizations virile, but they do not by themselves make
civilizations. Mutual aid and support are needed for that. There the
felines are lacking. They do not co-operate well; they have small
group-devotion. Their lordliness, their strong self-regard, and their
coolness of heart, have somehow thwarted the chance of their racial
progress.




_SEVEN_


There are many other beasts that one might once have thought had a
chance.

Some, like horses and deer, were not bold enough; or were stupid, like
buffaloes.

Some had over-trustful characters, like the seals; or exploitable
characters, like cows, and chickens, and sheep. Such creatures sentence
themselves to be captives, by their lack of ambition.

Dogs? They have more spirit. But they have lost their chance of
kingship through worshipping us. The dog's finer qualities can't be
praised too warmly; there is a purity about his devotion which makes
mere men feel speechless: but with all love for dogs, one must grant
they are vassals, not rulers. They are too parasitic--the one willing
servant class of the world. And we have betrayed them by making
under-simians of them. We have taught them some of our own ways of
behaving, and frowned upon theirs. Loving us, they let us stop their
developing in tune with their natures; and they've patiently tried ever
since to adopt ways of ours. They have done it, too; but of course they
can't get far: it's not their own road. Dogs have more love than
integrity. They've been true to us, yes, but they haven't been true to
themselves.

Pigs? The pig is remarkably intelligent and brave,--but he's gross; and
grossness delays one's achievement, it takes so much time. The snake
too, though wise, has a way of eating himself into stupors. If
super-snake-men had had banquets they would have been too vast to
describe. Each little snake family could have eaten a herd of cattle at
Christmas.

Goats, then? Bears or turtles? Wolves, whales, crows? Each had brains
and pride, and would have been glad to rule the world if they could;
but each had their defects, and their weaknesses for such a position.

The elephant? Ah! Evolution has had its tragedies, hasn't it, as well
as its triumphs; and well should the elephant know it. He had the best
chance of all. Wiser even than the lion, or the wisest of apes, his
wisdom furthermore was benign where theirs was sinister. Consider his
dignity, his poise and skill. He was plastic, too. He had learned to
eat many foods and endure many climates. Once, some say, this race
explored the globe. Their bones are found everywhere, in South America
even; so the elephants' Columbus may have found some road here before
ours. They are cosmopolitans, these suave and well-bred beings. They
have rich emotional natures, long memories, loyalty; they are steady
and sure; and not narrow, not self-absorbed, for they seem interested
in everything. What was it then, that put them out of the race?

Could it have been a quite natural belief that they had already won?

And when they saw that they hadn't, and that the monkey-men were
getting ahead, were they too great-minded and decent to exterminate
their puny rivals?

It may have been their tolerance and patience that betrayed them. They
wait too long before they resent an imposition or insult. Just as ants
are too energetic and cats too shrewd for their own highest good, so
the elephants suffer from too much patience. Their exhibitions of it
may seem superb,--such power and such restraint, combined, are
noble,--but a quality carried to excess defeats itself. Kings who won't
lift their scepters must yield in the end; and, the worst of it is, to
upstarts who snatch at their crowns.

                     *      *      *      *      *

I fancy the elephants would have been gentler masters than we: more
live-and-let-live in allowing other species to stay here. Our way is to
kill good and bad, male and female and babies, till the few last
survivors lie hidden away from our guns. All species must surrender
unconditionally--those are our terms--and come and live in barns
alongside us; or on us, as parasites. The creatures that want to live a
life of their own, we call wild. If wild, then no matter how harmless
we treat them as outlaws, and those of us who are specially well
brought up shoot them for fun. Some might be our friends. We don't wish
it. We keep them all terrorized. When one of us conquering monkey-men
enters the woods, most animals that scent him slink away, or race off
in a panic. It is not that we have planned this deliberately: but they
know what we're like. Race by race they have been slaughtered. Soon all
will be gone. We give neither freedom nor life-room to those we defeat.

If we had been as strong as the elephants, we might have been kinder.
When great power comes naturally to people, it is used more urbanely.
We use it as parvenus do, because that's what we are. The elephant,
being born to it, is easy-going, confident, tolerant. He would have
been a more humane king.

                     *      *      *      *      *

A race descended from elephants would have had to build on a large
scale. Imagine a crowd of huge, wrinkled, slow-moving elephant-men
getting into a vast elephant omnibus.

And would they have ever tried airships?

The elephant is stupid when it comes to learning how to use tools. So
are all other species except our own. Isn't it strange? A tool, in the
most primitive sense, is any object, lying around, that can obviously
be used as an instrument for this or that purpose. Many creatures use
objects as _materials_, as birds use twigs for nests. But the step that
no animal takes is learning freely to use things as instruments. When
an elephant plucks off a branch and swishes his flanks, and thus keeps
away insects, he is using a tool. But he does it only by a vague and
haphazard association of ideas. If he once became a conscious user of
tools he would of course go much further.

We ourselves, who are so good at it now, were slow enough in beginning.
Think of the long epochs that passed before it entered our heads.

And all that while the contest for leadership blindly went on, without
any species making use of this obvious aid. The lesson to be learned
was simple: the reward was the rule of a planet. Yet only one species,
our own, has ever had that much brains.

It makes you wonder what other obvious lessons may still be unlearned.

                     *      *      *      *      *

It is not necessarily stupid however, to fail to use tools. To use
tools involves using reason, instead of sticking to instinct. Now,
sticking to instinct has its disadvantages, but so has using reason.
Whichever faculty you use, the other atrophies, and partly deserts you.
We are trying to use both. But we still don't know which has the more
value.

                     *      *      *      *      *

A sudden vision comes to me of one of the first far-away ape-men who
tried to use reason instead of instinct as a guide for his conduct. I
imagine him, perched in his tree, torn between those two voices,
wailing loudly at night by a river, in his puzzled distress.

My poor far-off brother!

[Illustration: The First Thinker.]



_EIGHT_


We have been considering which species was on the whole most finely
equipped to be rulers, and thereafter achieve a high civilization; but
that wasn't the problem. The real problem was which would _do_
it:--a different matter.

To do it there was need of a species that had at least these two
qualities: some quenchless desire, to urge them on and on; and also
adaptability of a thousand kinds to their environment.

The rhinoceros cares little for adaptability. He slogs through the
world. But we! we are experts. Adaptability is what we depend on. We
talk of our mastery of nature, which sounds very grand; but the fact is
we respectfully adapt ourselves first, to her ways. "We attain no power
over nature till we learn natural laws, and our lordship depends on the
adroitness with which we learn and conform."

Adroitness however is merely an ability to win; back of it there must
be some spur to make us use our adroitness. Why don't we all die or
give up when we're sick of the world? Because the love of life is
reënforced, in most energized beings, by some longing that pushes them
forward, in defeat and in darkness. All creatures wish to live, and to
perpetuate their species, of course; but those two wishes alone
evidently do not carry any race far. In addition to these, a race, to
be great, needs some hunger, some itch, to spur it up the hard path we
lately have learned to call evolution. The love of toil in the ants,
and of craft in cats, are examples (imaginary or not). What other such
lust could exert great driving force?

With us is it curiosity? endless interest in one's environment?

Many animals have some curiosity, but "some" is not enough; and in but
few is it one of the master passions. By a master passion, I mean a
passion that is really your master: some appetite which habitually, day
in, day out, makes its subjects forget fatigue or danger, and sacrifice
their ease to its gratification. That is the kind of hold that
curiosity has on the monkeys.




_NINE_


Imagine a prehistoric prophet observing these beings, and forecasting
what kind of civilizations their descendants would build. Anyone could
have foreseen certain parts of the simians' history: could have guessed
that their curiosity would unlock for them, one by one, nature's doors,
and--idly--bestow on them stray bits of valuable knowledge: could have
pictured them spreading inquiringly all over the globe, stumbling on
their inventions--and idly passing on and forgetting them.

To have to learn the same thing over and over again wastes the time of
a race. But this is continually necessary, with simians, because of
their disorder. "Disorder," a prophet would have sighed: "that is one
of their handicaps; one that they will never get rid of, whatever it
costs. Having so much curiosity makes a race scatter-brained.

"Yes," he would have dismally continued, "it will be a queer mixture:
these simians will attain to vast stores of knowledge, in time, that is
plain. But after spending centuries groping to discover some art, in
after-centuries they will now and then find it's forgotten. How
incredible it would seem on other planets to hear of lost arts.

"There is a strong streak of triviality in them, which you don't see in
cats. They won't have fine enough characters to concentrate on the
things of most weight. They will talk and think far more of trifles
than of what is important. Even when they are reasonably civilized,
this will be so. Great discoveries sometimes will fail to be heard of,
because too much else is; and many will thus disappear, and these men
will not know it."[1]

      [1] We did rescue Mendel's from the dust heap; but perhaps it was
      an exception.

                     *      *      *      *      *

Let me interrupt this lament to say a word for myself and my ancestors.
It is easy to blame us as undiscriminating, but we are at least full of
zest. And it's well to be interested, eagerly and intensely, in so many
things, because there is often no knowing which may turn out important.
We don't go around being interested on purpose, hoping to profit by it,
but a profit may come. And anyway it is generous of us not to be too
self-absorbed. Other creatures go to the other extreme to an amazing
extent. They are ridiculously oblivious to what is going on. The
smallest ant in the garden will ignore the largest woman who visits it.
She is a huge and most dangerous super-mammoth in relation to him, and
her tread shakes the earth; but he has no time to be bothered,
investigating such-like phenomena. He won't even get out of her way. He
has his work to do, hang it.

Birds and squirrels have less of this glorious independence of spirit.
They watch you closely--if you move around. But not if you keep still.
In other words, they pay no more attention than they can help, even to
mammoths.

We of course observe everything, or try to. We could spend our lives
looking on. Consider our museums for instance: they are a sign of our
breed. It makes us smile to see birds, like the magpie, with a mania
for this collecting--but only monkeyish beings could reverence museums
as we do, and pile such heterogeneous trifles and quantities in them.
Old furniture, egg-shells, watches, bits of stone.... And next door, a
"menagerie." Though our victory over all other animals is now aeons
old, we still bring home captives and exhibit them caged in our cities.
And when a species dies out--or is crowded (by us) off the planet--we
even collect the bones of the vanquished and show them like trophies.

                     *      *      *      *      *

Curiosity is a valuable trait. It will make the simians learn many
things. But the curiosity of a simian is as excessive as the toil of an
ant. Each simian will wish to know more than his head can hold, let
alone ever deal with; and those whose minds are active will wish to
know everything going. It would stretch a god's skull to accomplish
such an ambition, yet simians won't like to think it's beyond their
powers. Even small tradesmen and clerks, no matter how thrifty, will be
eager to buy costly encyclopedias, or books of all knowledge. Almost
every simian family, even the dullest, will think it is due to
themselves to keep all knowledge handy.

Their idea of a liberal education will therefore be a great
hodge-podge; and he who narrows his field and digs deep will be viewed
as an alien. If more than one man in a hundred should thus dare to
concentrate, the ruinous effects of being a specialist will be sadly
discussed. It may make a man exceptionally useful, they will have to
admit; but still they will feel badly, and fear that civilization will
suffer.

                     *      *      *      *      *

One of their curious educational ideas--but a natural one--will be
shown in the efforts they will make to learn more than one "language."
They will set their young to spending a decade or more of their lives
in studying duplicate systems--whole systems--of chatter. Those who
thus learn several different ways to say the same things, will command
much respect, and those who learn many will be looked on with awe--by
true simians. And persons without this accomplishment will be looked
down on a little, and will actually feel quite apologetic about it
themselves.

Consider how enormously complicated a complete language must be, with
its long and arbitrary vocabulary, its intricate system of sounds; the
many forms that single words may take, especially if they are verbs;
the rules of grammar, the sentence structure, the idioms, slang and
inflections. Heavens, what a genius for tongues these simians have![2]
Where another race, after the most frightful discord and pains, might
have slowly constructed _one_ language before this earth grew cold,
this race will create literally hundreds, each complete in itself, and
many of them with quaint little systems of writing attached. And the
owners of this linguistic gift are so humble about it, they will marvel
at bees, for their hives, and at beavers' mere dams.

      [2] You remember what Kipling says in the Jungle Books, about how
      disgusted the quiet animals were with the Bandarlog, because they
      were eternally chattering, would never keep still. Well, this is
      the good side of it.

                     *      *      *      *      *

To return, however, to their fear of being too narrow, in going to the
other extreme they will run to incredible lengths. Every civilized
simian, every day of his life, in addition to whatever older facts he
has picked up, will wish to know all the news of all the world. If he
felt any true concern to know it, this would be rather fine of him: it
would imply such a close solidarity on the part of this genus. (Such a
close solidarity would seem crushing, to others; but that is another
matter.) It won't be true concern, however, it will be merely a blind
inherited instinct. He'll forget what he's read, the very next hour, or
moment. Yet there he will faithfully sit, the ridiculous creature,
reading of bombs in Spain or floods in Thibet, and especially insisting
on all the news he can get of the kind our race loved when they
scampered and fought in the forest, news that will stir his most
primitive simian feelings,--wars, accidents, love affairs, and family
quarrels.

To feed himself with this largely purposeless provender, he will pay
thousands of simians to be reporters of such events day and night; and
they will report them on such a voluminous scale as to smother or
obscure more significant news altogether. Great printed sheets will be
read by every one every day; and even the laziest of this lazy race
will not think it labor to perform this toil. They won't like to eat in
the morning without their papers, such slaves they will be to this
droll greed for knowing. They won't even think it is droll, it is so in
their blood.

Their swollen desire for investigating everything about them, including
especially other people's affairs, will be quenchless. Few will feel
that they really are "fully informed"; and all will give much of each
day all their lives to the news.

Books too will be used to slake this unappeasable thirst. They will
actually hold books in deep reverence. Books! Bottled chatter! things
that some other simian has formerly said. They will dress them in
costly bindings, keep them under glass, and take an affecting pride in
the number they read. Libraries,--store-houses of books,--will dot
their world. The destruction of one will be a crime against
civilization. (Meaning, again, a simian civilization.) Well, it is an
offense to be sure--a barbaric offense. But so is defacing forever a
beautiful landscape; and they won't even notice that sometimes; they
won't shudder anyway, the way they instinctively do at the loss of a
"library."

                     *      *      *      *      *

All this is inevitable and natural, and they cannot help it. There even
are ways one can justify excesses like this. If their hunger for books
ever seems indiscriminate to them when they themselves stop to examine
it, they will have their excuses. They will argue that some bits of
knowledge they once had thought futile, had later on come in most
handy, in unthought of ways. True enough! For their scientists. But not
for their average men: they will simply be like obstinate housekeepers
who clog up their homes, preserving odd boxes and wrappings, and stray
lengths of string, to exult if but one is of some trifling use ere they
die. It will be in this spirit that simians will cherish their books,
and pile them up everywhere into great indiscriminate mounds; and these
mounds will seem signs of culture and sagacity to them.

Those who know many facts will feel wise! They will despise those who
don't. They will even believe, many of them, that knowledge is power.
Unfortunate dupes of this saying will keep on reading, ambitiously,
till they have stunned their native initiative, and made their thoughts
weak; and will then wonder dazedly what in the world is the matter, and
why the great power they were expecting to gain fails to appear. Again,
if they ever forget what they read, they'll be worried. Those who _can_
forget--those with fresh eyes who have swept from their minds such
facts as the exact month and day that their children were born, or the
numbers on houses, or the names (the mere meaningless labels) of the
people they meet,--will be urged to go live in sanitariums or see
memory doctors!

                     *      *      *      *      *

By nature their itch is rather for knowing, than for understanding or
thinking. Some of them will learn to think, doubtless, and even to
concentrate, but their eagerness to acquire those accomplishments will
not be strong or insistent. Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity
will enjoy the accumulating of facts, far more than the pausing at
times to reflect on those facts. If they do not reflect on them, of
course they'll be slow to find out about the ideas and relationships
lying behind them; and they will be curious about those ideas; so you
would suppose they'd reflect. But deep thinking is painful. It means
they must channel the spready rivers of their attention. That cannot be
done without discipline and drills for the mind; and they will abhor
doing that; their minds will work better when they are left free to run
off at tangents.

Compare them in this with other species. Each has its own kind of
strength. To be compelled to be so quick-minded as the simians would be
torture, to cows. Cows could dwell on one idea, week by week, without
trying at all; but they'd all have brain-fever in an hour at a simian
tea. A super-cow people would revel in long thoughtful books on
abstruse philosophical subjects, and would sit up late reading them.
Most of the ambitious simians who try it--out of pride--go to sleep.
The typical simian brain is supremely distractable, and it's really too
jumpy by nature to endure much reflection.

Therefore many more of them will be well-informed than sagacious.

This will result in their knowing most things far too soon, at too
early a stage of civilization to use them aright. They will learn to
make valuable explosives at a stage in their growth, when they will use
them not only in industries, but for killing brave men. They will
devise ways to mine coal efficiently, in enormous amounts, at a stage
when they won't know enough to conserve it, and will waste their few
stores. They will use up a lot of it in a simian habit[3] called
travel. This will consist in queer little hurried runs over the globe,
to see ten thousand things in the hope of thus filling their minds.

      [3] Even in a wild state, the monkey is restless and does not
      live in lairs.

Their minds will be full enough. Their intelligence will be active and
keen. It will have a constant tendency however to outstrip their
wisdom. Their intelligence will enable them to build great industrial
systems before they have the wisdom and goodness to run them aright.
They will form greater political empires than they will have strength
to guide. They will endlessly quarrel about which is the best scheme of
government, without stopping to realize that learning to govern comes
first. (The average simian will imagine he knows without learning.)

The natural result will be industrial and political wars. In a world of
unmanageable structures, wild smashes must come.




_TEN_


Inventions will come so easily to simians (in comparison with all other
creatures) and they will take such childish pleasure in monkeying
around, making inventions, that their many devices will be more of a
care than a comfort. In their homes a large part of their time will
have to be spent keeping their numerous ingenuities in good working
order--their elaborate bell-ringing arrangements, their locks and their
clocks. In the field of science to be sure, this fertility in invention
will lead to a long list of important and beautiful discoveries:
telescopes and the calculus, radiographs, and the spectrum. Discoveries
great enough, almost, to make angels of them. But here again their
simian-ness will cheat them of half of their dues, for they will
neglect great discoveries of the truest importance, and honor
extravagantly those of less value and splendor if only they cater
especially to simian traits.

To consider examples: A discovery that helps them to talk, just to
talk, more and more, will be hailed by these beings as one of the
highest of triumphs. Talking to each other over wires will come in this
class. The lightning when harnessed and tamed will be made to trot
round, conveying the most trivial cacklings all day and night.

Huge seas of talk of every sort and kind, in print, speech, and
writing, will roll unceasingly over their civilized realms, involving
an unbelievable waste in labor and time, and sapping the intelligence
talk is supposed to upbuild. In a simian civilization, great halls will
be erected for lectures, and great throngs will actually pay to go
inside at night to hear some self-satisfied talk-maker chatter for
hours. Almost any subject will do for a lecture, or talk; yet very few
subjects will be counted important enough for the average man to do any
_thinking_ on them, off by himself.

In their futurist books they will dream of an even worse state, a more
dreadful indulgence in communication than the one just described. This
they'll hope to achieve by a system called mental telepathy. They will
long to communicate wordlessly, mind impinging on mind, until all their
minds are awash with messages every moment, and withdrawal from the
stream is impossible anywhere on earth. This will foster the
brotherhood of man. (Conglomerateness being their ideal.) Super-cats
would have invented more barriers instead of more channels.

Discoveries in surgery and medicine will also be over-praised. The
reason will be that the race will so need these discoveries. Unlike the
great cats, simians tend to undervalue the body. Having less
self-respect, less proper regard for their egos, they care less than
the cats do for the casing of the ego,--the body. The more civilized
they grow the more they will let their bodies deteriorate. They will
let their shoulders stoop, their lungs shrink, and their stomachs grow
fat. No other species will be quite so deformed and distorted.
Athletics they will watch, yes, but on the whole sparingly practise.
Their snuffy old scholars will even be proud to decry them. Where once
the simians swung high through forests, or scampered like deer, their
descendants will plod around farms, or mince along city streets, moving
constrictedly, slowly, their litheness half gone.

They will think of Nature as "something to go out and look at." They
will try to live wholly apart from her and forget they're her sons.
Forget? They will even deny it, and declare themselves sons of God. In
spite of her wonders they will regard Nature as somehow too humble to
be the true parent of such prominent people as simians. They will lose
all respect for the dignity of fair Mother Earth, and whisper to each
other she is an evil and indecent old person. They will snatch at her
gifts, pry irreverently into her mysteries, and ignore half the
warnings they get from her about how to live.

Ailments of every kind will abound among such folk, inevitably, and
they will resort to extraordinary expedients in their search for
relief. Although squeamish as a race about inflicting much pain in cold
blood, they will systematically infect other animals with their own
rank diseases, or cut out other animals' organs, or kill and dissect
them, hoping thus to learn how to offset their neglect of themselves.
Conditions among them will be such that this will really be necessary.
Few besides impractical sentimentalists will therefore oppose it. But
the idea will be to gain health by legerdemain, by a trick, instead of
by taking the trouble to live healthy lives.

Strange barrack-like buildings called hospitals will stand in their
cities, where their trick-men, the surgeons, will slice them right open
when ill; and thousands of zealous young pharmacists will mix little
drugs, which thousands of wise-looking simians will firmly prescribe.
Each generation will change its mind as to these drugs, and laugh at
all former opinions; but each will use some of them, and each will feel
assured that in this respect they know the last word.

And, in obstinate blindness, this people will wag their poor heads, and
attribute their diseases not to simian-ness but to civilization.

The advantages that any man or race has, can sometimes be handicaps.
Having hands, which so aids a race, for instance, can also be harmful.
The simians will do so many things with their hands, it will be bad for
their bodies. Instead of roaming far and wide over the country, getting
vigorous exercise, they will use their hands to catch and tame horses,
build carriages, motors, and then when they want a good outing they
will "go for a ride," with their bodies slumped down, limp and
sluggish, and losing their spring.

Then too their brains will do harm, and great harm, to their bodies.
The brain will give them such an advantage over all other animals that
they will insensibly be led to rely too much on it, to give it too free
a rein, and to find the mirrors in it too fascinating. This organ, this
outgrowth, this new part of them, will grow over-active, and its many
fears and fancies will naturally injure the body. The interadjustment
is delicate and intimate, the strain is continuous. When the brain
fails to act with the body, or, worse, works against it, the body will
sicken no matter what cures doctors try.

As in bodily self-respect, so in racial self-respect, they'll be
wanting. They will have plenty of racial pride and prejudice, but that
is not the same thing. That will make them angry when simians of one
color mate with those of another. But a general deterioration in
physique will cause much less excitement.

They will _talk_ about improving the race--they will talk about
everything--but they won't use their chances to _do_ it. Whenever a new
discovery makes life less hard, for example, these heedless beings will
seldom preserve this advantage, or use their new wealth to take more
time thereafter for thought, or to gain health and strength or do
anything else to make the race better. Instead, they will use the new
ease just to increase in numbers; and they will keep on at this until
misery once more has checked them. Life will then be as hard as ever,
naturally, and the chance will be gone.

They will have a proverb, "The poor ye have always with you,"--said by
one who knew simians.

Their ingenious minds will have an answer to this. They will argue it
is well that life should be Spartan and hard, because of the discipline
and its strengthening effects on the character. But the good effects of
this sort of discipline will be mixed with sad wreckage. And only
creatures incapable of disciplining themselves could thus argue. It is
an odd expedient to get yourself into trouble just for discipline's
sake.

The fact is, however, the argument won't be sincere. When their nations
grow so over-populous and their families so large it means misery, that
will not be a sign of their having felt ready for discipline. It will
be a sign of their not having practised it in their sexual lives.




_ELEVEN_


The simians are always being stirred by desire and passion. It
constantly excites them, constantly runs through their minds. Wild or
tame, primitive or cultured, this is a brand of the breed. Other
species have times and seasons for sexual matters, but the simian-folk
are thus preoccupied all the year round.

This super-abundance of desire is not necessarily good or bad, of
itself. But to shape it for the best it will have to be studied--and
faced. This they will not do. Some of them won't like to study it,
deeming it bad--deeming it bad yet yielding constantly to it. Others
will hesitate because they will deem it so sacred, or will secretly
fear that study might show them it ought to be curbed.

Meantime, this part of their nature will be coloring all their
activities. It will beautify their arts, and erotically confuse their
religions. It will lend a little interest to even their dull social
functions. It will keep alive degrading social evils in all their great
towns. Through these latter evils, too, their politics will be
corrupted; especially their best and most democratic attempts at
self-government. Self-government works best among those who have
learned to self-govern.

                     *      *      *      *      *

In the far distant ages that lie before us what will be the result of
this constant preoccupation with desire? Will it kill us or save us?
Will this trait and our insatiable curiosity interact on each other?
That might further eugenics. That might give us a better chance to
breed finely than all other species.

                     *      *      *      *      *

We already owe a great deal to passion: more than men ever realize.
Wasn't it Darwin who once even risked the conjecture that the vocal
organs themselves were developed for sexual purposes, the object being
to call or charm one's mate. Hence--perhaps--only animals that were
continuously concerned with their matings would be at all likely to
form an elaborate language. And without an elaborate language, growth
is apt to be slow.

If we owe this to passion, what follows? Does it mean, for example,
that the more different mates that each simian once learned to charm,
the more rapidly language, and with it civilization, advanced?




_TWELVE_


A doctor, who was making a study of monkeys, once told me that he was
trying experiments that bore on the polygamy question. He had a young
monkey named Jack who had mated with a female named Jill; and in
another cage another newly-wedded pair, Arabella and Archer. Each pair
seemed absorbed in each other, and devoted and happy. They even hugged
each other at mealtime and exchanged bits of food.

After a time their transports grew less fiery, and their affections
less fixed. Archer got a bit bored. He was decent about it, though, and
when Arabella cuddled beside him he would more or less perfunctorily
embrace her. But when he forgot, she grew cross.

The same thing occurred a little later in the Jack and Jill cage, only
there it was Jill who became a little tired of Jack.

Soon each pair was quarreling. They usually made up, pretty soon, and
started loving again. But it petered out; each time more quickly.

[Illustration: Archer felt bored]

Meanwhile the two families had become interested in watching each
other. When Jill had repulsed Jack, and he had moped about it awhile,
he would begin staring at Arabella, over opposite, and trying to
attract her attention. This got Jack in trouble all around. Arabella
indignantly made faces at him and then turned her back; and as for
Jill, she grew furious, and tore out his fur.

But in the next stage, they even stopped hating each other. Each pair
grew indifferent.

Then the doctor put Jack in with Arabella, and Archer with Jill.
Arabella promptly yielded to Jack. New devotion. More transports. Jill
and Archer were shocked. Jill clung to the bars of her cage, quivering,
and screaming remonstrance; and even blasé Archer chattered angrily at
some of the scenes. Then the doctor hung curtains between the cages to
shut out the view. Jill and Archer, left to each other, grew
interested. They soon were inseparable.

The four monkeys, thus re-distributed, were now happy once more, and
full of new liveliness and spirit. But before very long, each pair
quarreled--and made up--and quarreled--and then grew indifferent, and
had cynical thoughts about life.

At this point, the doctor put them back with their original mates.

And--they met with a rush! Gave cries of recognition and joy, like
faithful souls reunited. And when they were tired, they affectionately
curled up together; and hugged each other even at mealtime, and
exchanged bits of food.

                     *      *      *      *      *

This was as far as the doctor had gotten, at the time that I met him;
and as I have lost touch with him since, I don't know how things were
afterward. His theory at the time was, that variety was good for
fidelity.

"So many of us feel this way, it may be in the blood," he concluded.
"Some creatures, such as wolves, are more serious; or perhaps more
cold-blooded. Never mate but once. Well--we're not wolves. We can't
make wolves our models. Of course we are not monkeys either, but at any
rate they are our cousins. Perhaps wolves can be continent without any
trouble at all, but it's harder for simians: it may affect their
nervous systems injuriously. If we want to know how to behave,
according to the way Nature made us, I say that with all due allowances
we should study the monkeys."

To be sure, these particular monkeys were living in idleness. This
corresponds to living in high social circles with us, where men do not
have to work, and lack some of the common incentives to home-building.
The experiment was not conclusive.

Still, even in low social circles--




_THIRTEEN_


Are we or are we not simians? It is no use for any man to try to think
anything else out until he has decided first of all where he stands on
that question. It is not only in love affairs: let us lay all that
aside for the moment. It is in ethics, economics, art, education,
philosophy, what-not. If we are fallen angels, we should go this road:
if we are super-apes, that.

"Our problem is not to discover what we ought to do if we were
different, but what we ought to do, being what we are. There is no end
to the beings we can imagine different from ourselves; but they do not
exist," and we cannot be sure they would be better than we if they did.
For, when we imagine them, we must imagine their entire environment;
they would have to be a part of some whole that does not now exist. And
that new whole, that new reality, being merely a figment of our little
minds, "would probably be inferior to the reality that is. For there is
this to be said in favor of reality: that we have nothing to compare it
with. Our fantasies are always incomplete, because they are fantasies.
And reality is complete. We cannot compare their incompleteness with
its completeness."[4]

      [4] From an anonymous article entitled "Tolstoy and Russia" in
      the _London Times_, Sept. 26, 1918.

Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality: a dislike of men as
they are. They are free to dislike them--but not at the same time to be
moralists. Their feeling leads them to ignore the obligation which
should rest on all teachers, "to discover the best that man can do, not
to set impossibilities before him and tell him that if he does not
perform them he is damned."

Man is moldable; very; and it is desirable that he should aspire. But
he is apt to be hasty about accepting any and all general ideals
without figuring out whether they are suitable for simian use.

One result of his habit of swallowing whole most of the ideals that
occur to him, is that he has swallowed a number that strongly conflict.
Any ideal whatever strains our digestions if it is hard to assimilate:
but when two at once act on us in different ways, it is unbearable. In
such a case, the poets will prefer the ideal that's idealest: the
hard-headed instinctively choose the one adapted to simians.

Whenever this is argued, extremists spring up on each side. One
extremist will say that being mere simians we cannot transcend much,
and will seem to think that having limitations we should preserve them
forever. The other will declare that we are not merely simians, never
were just plain animals; or, if we were, souls were somehow smuggled in
to us, since which time we have been different. We have all been
perfect at heart since that date, equipped with beautiful spirits,
which only a strange perverse obstinacy leads us to soil.

What this obstinacy is, is the problem that confronts theologians. They
won't think of it as simian-ness; they call it original sin. They
regard it as the voice of some devil, and say good men should not
listen to it. The scientists say it isn't a devil, it is part of our
nature, which should of course be civilized and guided, but should not
be stamped out. (It might mutilate us dangerously to become
under-simianized. Look at Mrs. Humphry Ward and George Washington.
Worthy souls, but no flavor.)

                     *      *      *      *      *

In every field of thought then, two schools appear, that are divided on
this: Must we forever be at heart high-grade simians? Or are we at
heart something else?

For example, in education, we have in the main two great systems. One
depends upon discipline. The other on exciting the interest. The
teacher who does not recognize or allow for our simian nature, keeps
little children at work for long periods at dull and dry tasks. Without
some such discipline, he fears that his boys will lack strength. The
other system believes they will learn more when their interest is
roused; and when their minds, which are mobile by nature, are allowed
to keep moving.

Or in politics: the best government for simians seems to be based on a
parliament: a talk-room, where endless vague thoughts can be expressed.
This is the natural child of those primeval sessions that gave pleasure
to apes. It is neither an ideal nor a rational arrangement of course.
Small executive committees would be better. But not if we are simians.

Or in industry: Why do factory workers produce more in eight hours a
day than in ten? It is absurd. Super-sheep could not do it. But that
is the way men are made. To preach to such beings about the dignity of
labor is futile. The dignity of labor is not a simian conception at
all. True simians hate to have to work steadily: they call it grind
and confinement. They are always ready to pity the toilers who are
condemned to this fate, and to congratulate those who escape it, or
who can do something else. When they see some performer in spangles
risk his life, at a circus, swinging around on trapezes, high up in
the air, and when they are told he must do it daily, do they pity
_him_? No! Super-elephants would say, and quite properly, "What a
horrible life!" But it naturally seems stimulating to simians. Boys
envy the fellow. On the other hand whenever we are told about factory
life, we instinctively shudder to think of enduring such evils. We see
some old workman, filling cans with a whirring machine; and we hear
the humanitarians telling us, indignant and grieving, that he actually
must stand in that nice, warm, dry room every day, safe from storms
and wild beasts, and with nothing to do but fill cans; and at once we
groan: "How deadly! What monotonous toil! Shorten his hours!" His work
would seem blissful to super-spiders,--but to us it's intolerable. The
factory system is meant for other species than ours.

Our monkey-blood is also apparent in our judgments of crime. If a crime
is committed on impulse, we partly forgive it. Why? Because, being
simians, with a weakness for yielding to impulses, we like to excuse
ourselves by feeling not accountable for them. Elephants would have
probably taken an opposite stand. They aren't creatures of impulse, and
would be shocked at crimes due to such causes; their fault is the
opposite one of pondering too long over injuries, and becoming
vindictive in the end, out of all due proportion. If a young
super-elephant were to murder another on impulse, they would consider
him a dangerous character and string him right up. But if he could
prove that he had long thought of doing it, they would tend to forgive
him. "Poor fellow, he brooded," they would say. "That's upsetting to
any one."

As to modesty and decency, if we are simians we have done well,
considering: but if we are something else--fallen angels--we have
indeed fallen far. Not being modest by instinct we invent artificial
ideals, which are doubtless well-meaning but are inherently of course
second-rate, so that even at our best we smell prudish. And as for our
worst, when we as we say let ourselves go, we dirty the life-force
unspeakably, with chuckles and leers. But a race so indecent by nature
as the simians are would naturally have a hard time behaving as though
they were not: and the strain of pretending that their thoughts were
all pretty and sweet, would naturally send them to smutty extremes for
relief. The standards of purity we have adopted are far too strict--for
simians.




_FOURTEEN_


We were speaking a while ago of the fertility with which simians breed.
This is partly due to the constant love interest they take in each
other, but it is also reënforced by their reliance on numbers. That
reliance will be deep, since, to their numbers, they will owe much
success. It will be thus that they will drive out other species, and
garrison the globe. Such a race would naturally come to esteem
fertility. It will seem profane not to.

As time goes on, however, the advantage of numbers will end; and in
their higher stages, large numbers will be a great drawback. The
resources of a planet are limited, at each stage of the arts. Also,
there is only a limited space on a planet. Yet it will come hard to
them to think of ever checking their increase. They will bring more
young into existence than they can either keep well or feed. The earth
will be covered with them everywhere, as far as eye can see. North and
south, east and west, there will always be simians huddling. Their
cities will be far more distressing than cities of vermin,--for vermin
are healthy and calm and successful in life.

Ah, those masses of people--unintelligent, superstitious, uncivilized!
What a dismal drain they will be on the race's strength! Not merely
will they lessen its ultimate chance of achievement; their hardships
will always distress and preoccupy minds,--fine, generous minds,--that
might have done great things if free: that might have done something
constructive at least, for their era, instead of being burned out
attacking mere anodyne-problems.

Nature will do what it can to lessen the strain, providing an
appropriate remedy for their bad behavior in plagues. Many epochs will
pass before the simians will learn or dare to control them--for they
won't think they can, any more than they dare control propagation. They
will reverently call their propagation and plagues "acts of God." When
they get tired of reverence and stop their plagues, it will be too
soon. Their inventiveness will be--as usual--ahead of their wisdom; and
they will unfortunately end the good effects of plagues (as a check)
before they are advanced enough to keep down their numbers themselves.

Meanwhile, when, owing to the pressure of other desires, any group of
primates does happen to become less prolific, they will feel ashamed,
talk of race suicide, and call themselves decadent. And they will often
be right: for though some regulation of the birth-rate is an obvious
good, and its diminution often desirable in any planet's history, yet
among simians it will be apt to come from second-rate motives. Greed,
selfishness or fear-thoughts will be the incentives, the bribes.
Contrivances, rather than continence, will be the method. How
audacious, and how disconcerting to Nature, to baffle her thus! Even
into her shrine they must thrust their bold paws to control her.
Another race viewing them in the garlanded chambers of love, unpacking
their singular devices, might think them grotesque: but the busy little
simians will be blind to such quaint incongruities.

Still, there is a great gift that their excess of passion will bestow
on this race: it will give them romance. It will teach them what little
they ever will learn about love. Other animals have little romance:
there is none in the rut: that seasonal madness that drives them to
mate with perhaps the first comer. But the simians will attain to a
fine discrimination in love, and this will be their path to the only
spiritual heights they can reach. For, in love, their inmost selves
will draw near, in the silence of truth; learning little by little what
the deepest sincerity means, and what clean hearts and minds and what
crystal-clear sight it demands. Such intercommunication of spirit with
spirit is at the beginning of all true understanding. It is the
beginning of silent cosmic wisdom: it may lead to knowing the ways of
that power called God.




_FIFTEEN_


Not content with the whole of a planet and themselves too, to study,
this race's children will also study the heavens. How few kinds of
creatures would ever have felt that impulse, and yet how natural it
will seem to these! How boundless and magnificent is the curiosity of
these tiny beings, who sit and peer out at the night from their small
whirling globe, considering deeply the huge cold seas of space, and
learning with wonderful skill to measure the stars.

In studies so vast, however, they are tested to the core. In these
great journeys the traveler must pay dear for his flaws. For it always
is when you most finely are exerting your strength that every weakness
you have most tells against you.

One weakness of the primates is the character of their self-consciousness.
This useful faculty, that can probe so deep, has one naïve defect--it
relies too readily on its own findings. It doesn't suspect enough its
own unconfessed predilections. It assumes that it can be completely
impartial--but isn't. To instance an obvious way in which it will
betray them: beings that are intensely self-conscious and aware of
their selves, will also instinctively feel that their universe is. What
active principle animates the world, they will ask. A great blind
force? It is possible. But they will recoil from admitting any such
possibility. A self-aware purposeful force then? That is better! (More
simian.) "A blind force can't have been the creator of all. It's
unthinkable." Any theory _their_ brains find "unthinkable" cannot be
true.

(This is not to argue that it really is a blind force--or the opposite.
It is merely an instance of how little impartial they are.)

                     *      *      *      *      *

A second typical weakness of this race will come from their fears. They
are not either self-sufficing or gallant enough to travel great roads
without cringing,--clear-eyed, unafraid. They are finely made, but not
nobly made,--in that sense. They will therefore have a too urgent need
of religion. Few primates have the courage to face--alone--the still
inner mysteries: Infinity, Space and Time. They will think it too
terrible, they will feel it would turn them to water, to live through
unearthly moments of vision without creeds or beliefs. So they'll get
beliefs first. Ah, poor creatures! The cart before the horse! Ah, the
blasphemy (pitiful!) of their seeking high spiritual temples, with
god-maps or bibles about them, made below in advance! Think of their
entering into the presence of Truth, declaring so loudly and boldly
they know her already, yet far from willing to stand or fall by her
flames--to rise like a phoenix or die as an honorable cinder!--but
creeping in, clad in their queer blindfolded beliefs, designed to
shield them from her stern, bright tests! Think of Truth sadly--or
merrily--eyeing such worms!




_SIXTEEN_


Imagine you are watching the Bandarlog at play in the forest. As you
behold them and comprehend their natures, now hugely brave and
boastful, now full of dread, the most weakly emotional of any
intelligent species, ever trying to attract the notice of some greater
animal, not happy indeed unless noticed,--is it not plain they are
bound to invent things called gods? Don't think for the moment of
whether there are gods or not; think of how sure these beings would be
to invent them. (Not wait to find them.) Having small self-reliance
they can not bear to face life alone. With no self-sufficingness, they
must have the countenance of others. It is these pressing needs that
will hurry the primates to build, out of each shred of truth they can
possibly twist to their purpose, and out of imaginings that will
impress them because they are vast, deity after deity to prop up their
souls.

What a strange company they will be, these gods, in their day, each of
them an old bearded simian up in the sky, who begins by fishing the
universe out of a void, like a conjurer taking a rabbit out of a hat.
(A hat which, if it resembled a void, wasn't there.) And after creating
enormous suns and spheres, and filling the farthest heavens with vaster
stars, one god will turn back and long for the smell of roast flesh,
another will call desert tribes to "holy" wars, and a third will grieve
about divorce or dancing.

All gods that any groups of simians ever conceive of, from the
woodenest little idol in the forest to the mightiest Spirit, no matter
how much they may differ, will have one trait in common: a readiness to
drop any cosmic affair at short notice, focus their minds on the
far-away pellet called Earth, and become immediately wholly concerned,
aye, engrossed, with any individual worshipper's woes or desires,--a
readiness to notice a fellow when he is going to bed. This will bring
indescribable comfort to simian hearts; and a god that neglects this
duty won't last very long, no matter how competent he may be in other
respects.

But one must reciprocate. For the maker of the Cosmos, as they see him,
wants noticing too; he is fond of the deference and attention that
simians pay him, and naturally he will be angry if it is withheld;--or
if he is not, it will be most magnanimous of him. Hence prayers and
hymns. Hence queer vague attempts at communing with this noble kinsman.

To desire communion with gods is a lofty desire, but hard to attain
through an ignobly definite creed. Dealing with the highest, most
wordless states of being, the simians will attempt to conceive them in
material form. They will have beliefs, for example, as to the
furnishings and occupations in heaven. And why? Why, to help men to
have religious conceptions without themselves being seers,--which in
any true sense of "religious" is an impossible plan.

                     *      *      *      *      *

In their efforts to be concrete they will make their creeds amusingly
simian. Consider the simian amorousness of Jupiter, and the brawls on
Olympus. Again, in the old Jewish Bible, what tempts the first pair?
The Tree of Knowledge, of course. It appealed to the curiosity of their
nature, and who could control _that_!

And Satan in the Bible is distinctly a simian's devil. The snake, it is
known, is the animal monkeys most dread. Hence when men give their
devil a definite form they make him a snake. A race of super-chickens
would have pictured their devil a hawk.




_SEVENTEEN_


What are the handicaps this race will have in building religions? The
greatest is this: they have such small psychic powers. The
over-activity of their minds will choke the birth of such powers, or
dull them. The race will be less in touch with Nature, some day, than
its dogs. It will substitute the compass for its once innate sense of
direction. It will lose its gifts of natural intuition, premonition,
and rest, by encouraging its use of the mind to be cheaply incessant.

This lack of psychic power will cheat them of insight and poise; for
minds that are wandering and active, not receptive and still, can
seldom or never be hushed to a warm inner peace.

One service these restless minds however will do: they eventually will
see through the religions they themselves invented.

But ages will be thrown away in repeating this process.

A simian creed will not be very hard thus to pierce. When forming a
religion, they will be in far too much haste, to wait to apply a strict
test to their holy men's visions. Furthermore they will have so few
visions, that any will awe them; so naturally they will accept any
vision as valid. Then their rapid and fertile inventiveness will come
into play, and spin the wildest creeds from each vision living dust
ever dreamed.

They will next expect everybody to believe whatever a few men have
seen, on the slippery ground that if you simply try believing it, you
will then feel it's true. Such religions are vicarious; their prophets
alone will see God, and the rest will be supposed to be introduced to
him by the prophets. These "believers" will have no white insight at
all of their own.

Now, a second-hand believer who is warmed at one remove--if at all--by
the breath of the spirit, will want to have exact definitions in the
beliefs he accepts. Not having had a vision to go by, he needs plain
commandments. He will always try to crystallize creeds. And that,
plainly, is fatal. For as time goes on, new and remoter aspects of
truth are discovered, which can seldom or never be fitted into creeds
that are changeless.

                     *      *      *      *      *

Over and over again, this will be the process: A spiritual personality
will be born; see new truth; and be killed. His new truth not only will
not fit into too rigid creeds, but whatever false finality is in them
it must contradict. So, the seer will be killed.

His truth being mighty, however, it will kill the creeds too.

There will then be nothing left to believe in--except the dead seer.

For a few generations he may then be understandingly honored. But his
priests will feel that is not enough: he must be honored uncritically:
so uncritically that, whatever his message, it must be deemed the Whole
Truth. Some of his message they themselves will have garbled; and it
was not, at best, final; but still it will be made into a fixed creed
and given his name. Truth will be given his name. All men who
thereafter seek truth must find only his kind, else they won't be his
"followers." (To be his co-seekers won't do.) Priests will always hate
any new seers who seek further for truth. Their feeling will be that
their seer found it, and thus ended all that. Just believe what he
says. The job's over. No more truth need be sought.

It's a comforting thing to believe cosmic search nicely settled.

Thus the mold will be hardened. So new truths, when they come, can but
break it. Then men will feel distraught and disillusioned, and
civilizations will fall.

Thus each cycle will run. So long as men intertwine falsehoods with
every seer's visions, both perish, and every civilization that is built
on them must perish too.




_EIGHTEEN_


If men can ever learn to accept all their truths as not final, and if
they can ever learn to build on something better than dogma, they may
not be found saying, discouragedly, every once in so often, that every
civilization carries in it the seeds of decay. It will carry such seeds
with great certainty, though, when they're put there, by the very race,
too, that will later deplore the results. Why shouldn't creeds totter
when they are jerry-built creeds?

On stars where creeds come late in the life of a race; where they
spring from the riper, not cruder, reactions of spirit; where they grow
out of nobly developed psychic powers that have put their possessors in
tune with cosmic music; and where no cheap hallucinations discredit
their truths; they perhaps run a finer, more beautiful course than the
simians', and open the eyes of the soul to far loftier visions.




_NINETEEN_


It has always been a serious matter for men when a civilization
decayed. But it may at some future day prove far more serious still.
Our hold on the planet is not absolute. Our descendants may lose it.

Germs may do them out of it. A chestnut fungus springs up, defies us,
and kills all our chestnuts. The boll weevil very nearly baffles us.
The fly seems unconquerable. Only a strong civilization, when such foes
are about, can preserve us. And our present efforts to cope with such
beings are fumbling and slow.

We haven't the habit of candidly facing this danger. We read our
biological history but we don't take it in. We blandly assume we were
always "intended" to rule, and that no other outcome could even be
considered by Nature. This is one of the remnants of ignorance certain
religions have left: but it's odd that men who don't believe in Easter
should still believe this. For the facts are of course this is a hard
and precarious world, where every mistake and infirmity must be paid
for in full.

                     *      *      *      *      *

If mankind ever is swept aside as a failure however, what a brilliant
and enterprising failure he at least will have been. I felt this with a
kind of warm suddenness only today, as I finished these dreamings and
drove through the gates of the park. I had been shutting my modern
surroundings out of my thoughts, so completely, and living as it were
in the wild world of ages ago, that when I let myself come back
suddenly to the twentieth century, and stare at the park and the
people, the change was tremendous. All around me were the well-dressed
descendants of primitive animals, whizzing about in bright motors, past
tall, soaring buildings. What gifted, energetic achievers they suddenly
seemed!

I thought of a photograph I had once seen, of a ship being torpedoed.
There it was, the huge, finely made structure, awash in the sea, with
tiny black spots hanging on to its side--crew and passengers. The great
ship, even while sinking, was so mighty, and those atoms so helpless.
Yet, it was those tiny beings that had created that ship. They had
planned it and built it and guided its bulk through the waves. They had
also invented a torpedo that could rend it asunder.

                     *      *      *      *      *

It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless
universe, living its brief life uncared-for, on this dark, cooling
star: but even so--and all the more--what marvelous creatures we are!
What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the jinns, is a
hundredth part as wonderful as this true fairy story of simians! It is
so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A universe
capable of giving birth to many such accidents is--blind or not--a good
world to live in, a promising universe.

And if there are no other such accidents, if we stand alone, if all the
uncountable armies of planets are empty, or peopled by animals only,
with no keys to thought, then we have done something so mighty, what
may it not lead to! What powers may we not develop before the Sun dies!
We once thought we lived on God's footstool: it may be a throne.

This is no world for pessimists. An amoeba on the beach, blind and
helpless, a mere bit of pulp,--that amoeba has grandsons today who read
Kant and play symphonies. Will those grandsons in turn have descendants
who will sail through the void, discover the foci of forces, the means
to control them, and learn how to marshal the planets and grapple with
space? Would it after all be any more startling than our rise from the
slime?

No sensible amoeba would have ever believed for a minute that any of
his most remote children would build and run dynamos. Few sensible men
of today stop to feel, in their hearts, that we live in the very same
world where that miracle happened.

This world, and our racial adventure, are magical still.




_TWENTY_


Yet although for high-spirited marchers the march is sufficient, there
still is that other way of looking at it that we dare not forget. Our
adventure may satisfy _us_: does it satisfy Nature? She is letting us
camp for awhile here among the wrecked graveyards of mightier
dynasties, not one of which met her tests. Their bones are the message
the epochs she murdered have left us: we have learned to decipher their
sickening warning at last.

                     *      *      *      *      *

Yes, and even if we are permitted to have a long reign, and are not
laid away with the failures, are we a success?

We need so much spiritual insight, and we have so little. Our airships
may some day float over the hills of Arcturus, but how will that help
us if we cannot find the soul of the world? Is that soul alive and
loving? or cruel? or callous? or dead?

We have no sure vision. Hopes, guesses, beliefs--that is all.

There are sounds we are deaf to, there are strange sights invisible to
us. There are whole realms of splendor, it may be, of which we are
heedless; and which we are as blind to as ants to the call of the sea.

Life is enormously flexible--look at all that we've done to our
dogs,--but we carry our hairy past with us wherever we go. The wise St.
Bernards and the selfish toy lap-dogs are brothers, and some things are
possible for them and others are not. So with us. There are definite
limits to simian civilizations, due in part to some primitive traits
that help keep us alive, and in part to the mere fact that every being
has to be something, and when one is a simian one is not also
everything else. Our main-springs are fixed, and our principal traits
are deep-rooted. We cannot now re-live the ages whose imprint we bear.

We have but to look back on our past to have hope in our future:
but--it will be only _our_ future, not some other race's. We shall
win our own triumphs, yet know that they would have been different, had
we cared above all for creativeness, beauty, or love.

                     *      *      *      *      *

So we run about, busy and active, marooned on this star, always
violently struggling, yet with no clearly seen goal before us. Men,
animals, insects--what tribe of us asks any object, except to keep
trying to satisfy its own master appetite? If the ants were earth's
lords they would make no more use of their lordship than to learn and
enjoy every possible method of toiling. Cats would spend their span of
life, say, trying new kinds of guile. And we, who crave so much to
know, crave so little but knowing. Some of us wish to know Nature most;
those are the scientists. Others, the saints and philosophers, wish to
know God. Both are alike in their hearts, yes, in spite of their
quarrels. Both seek to assuage, to no end, the old simian thirst.

If we wanted to _be_ Gods--but ah, can we grasp that ambition?




A NOTE ON THE TYPE IN WHICH THIS BOOK IS SET

_The text of this book was set on the linotype in Baskerville. The
punches for this face were cut under the supervision of George W.
Jones, an eminent English printer. Linotype Baskerville is a facsimile
cutting from type cast from the original matrices of a face designed by
John Baskerville. The original face was the forerunner of the "modern"
group of type faces.

¶ John Baskerville (1706-75), of Birmingham, England, a writing-master,
with a special renown for cutting inscriptions in stone, began
experimenting about 1750 with punch-cutting and making typographical
material. It was not until 1757 that he published his first work, a
Virgil in royal quarto, with great-primer letters. This was followed by
his famous editions of Milton, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer,
and several Latin classic authors. His types, at first criticized as
unnecessarily slender, delicate, and feminine, in time were recognized
as both distinct and elegant, and both his types and his printing were
greatly admired. Printers, however, preferred the stronger types of
Caslon, and Baskerville before his death repented of having attempted
the business of printing. For four years after his death his widow
continued to conduct his business. She then sold all his punches and
matrices to the Société Littéraire-typographique, which used some of
the types for the sumptuous Kehl edition of Voltaire's works in seventy
volumes.--_

COMPOSED, PRINTED AND BOUND BY
H. WOLFF, NEW YORK. PAPER MADE
BY P. F. GLATFELTER & CO.,
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