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.