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 I 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 descrimination 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.