XV


Not content with the whole of a planet and themselves too, to study,
this race's children will also study the heavens. How few kinds of
creatures would ever have felt that impulse, and yet how natural it
will seem to these! How boundless and magnificent is the curiosity
of these tiny beings, who sit and peer out at the night from their
small whirling globe, considering deeply the huge cold seas of space,
and learning with wonderful skill to measure the stars.

In studies so vast, however, they are tested to the core. In these
great journeys the traveller must pay dear for his flaws. For it
always is when you most finely are exerting your strength that every
weakness you have most tells against you.

One weakness of the primates is the character of their
self-consciousness. This useful faculty, that can probe so-deep,
has one naive defect--it relies too readily on its own findings.
It doesn't suspect enough its own unconfessed predilections.
It assumes that it can be completely impartial--but isn't. To
instance an obvious way in which it will betray them: beings that
are intensely self-conscious and aware of their selves, will also
instinctively feel that their universe is. What active principle
animates the world, they will ask. A great blind force? It is
possible. But they will recoil from admitting any such possibility.
A self-aware purposeful force then? That is better! (More simian.)