Man is a quadruped who has learned to use his front legs for other things
than walking. Some hold that he has learned to use his head. But there
are three things man cannot do, and four which he cannot compass: to see,
to think, to judge, and to act--to see the obvious; to think upon the
thing seen; to judge between our own resultant and conflicting thoughts,
with no furtive finger of desire to tip the balance; and to act upon that
judgment without flinching. We fear the final and irretrievable calamity:
we fear to make ourselves conspicuous, we conform to standard, we bear
ourselves meekly in that station whereunto it hath pleased Heaven to call
us; the herd instinct survives four-footedness. For, we note the strange
but not the familiar; our thinking is to right reason what peat is to
coal; the outcry of the living and the dead perverts judgment, closes the
ear to proof; and our wisest fear the scorn of fools. So we walk cramped
and strangely under the tragic tyranny of reiteration: whatever is right;
whatever is repeated often enough is true; and logic is a device for
evading the self-evident. Moreover, Carthage should be destroyed.

Such sage reflections present themselves automatically, contrasting the
blithesome knee action of prosperous Mr. Mitchell with the stiffened
joints of other men who had climbed those hard stairs on occasion with
shambling step, bent backs and sagging shoulders; with faces lined and
interlined; with eyes dulled and dim, and sunken cheeks; with hands
misshapen, knotted and bent by toil: if image indeed of God, strangely
distorted--or a strange God.

Consider now, in a world yielding enough and to spare for all, the
endless succession of wise men, from the Contributing Editor of
Proverbs unto this day, who have hymned the praise of diligence and
docility, the scorn of sloth. Yet not one sage of the bountiful bunch