XIII


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."[1]

[1] 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