he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a
foreign land? These things can never be important to the elephant; they
are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic
size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant. The
elephant has nothing against the spider--he cannot get down to that
remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent; I
am indifferent. The elephant would not take the trouble to do the spider
an ill turn; if he took the notion he might do him a good turn, if it
came in his way and cost nothing. I have done men good service, but no
ill turns.

"The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power, intellect,
and dignity the one creature is separated from the other by a distance
which is simply astronomical. Yet in these, as in all qualities, man is
immeasurably further below me than is the wee spider below the elephant.

"Man's mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little
trivialities together and gets a result--such as it is. My mind creates!
Do you get the force of that? Creates anything it desires--and in a
moment. Creates without material. Creates fluids, solids, colors
--anything, everything--out of the airy nothing which is called Thought.
A man imagines a silk thread, imagines a machine to make it, imagines a
picture, then by weeks of labor embroiders it on canvas with the thread.
I think the whole thing, and in a moment it is before you--created.

"I think a poem, music, the record of a game of chess--anything--and it
is there. This is the immortal mind--nothing is beyond its reach.
Nothing can obstruct my vision; the rocks are transparent to me, and
darkness is daylight. I do not need to open a book; I take the whole of
its contents into my mind at a single glance, through the cover; and in a