Life is enormously flexible--look at all that we've done to our
dogs,--but we carry our hairy past with us wherever we go. The
wise St. Bernards and the selfish toy lap-dogs are brothers, and
some things are possible for them and others are not. So with us.
There are definite limits to simian civilizations, due in part to
some primitive traits that help keep us alive, and in part to the
mere fact that every being has to be something, and when one is a
simian one is not also everything else. Our main-springs are fixed,
and our principal traits are deep-rooted. We cannot now re-live
the ages whose imprint we bear.

We have but to look back on our past to have hope in our future:
but--it will be only /our/ future, not some other race's. We shall
win our own triumphs, yet know that they would have been different,
had we cared above all for creativeness, beauty, or love.


So we run about, busy and active, marooned on this star, always
violently struggling, yet with no clearly seen goal before us.
Men, animals, insects--what tribe of us asks any object, except
to keep trying to satisfy its own master appetite? If the ants
were earth's lords they would make no more use of their lordship
than to learn and enforce every possible method of foiling. Cats
would spend their span of life, say, trying new kinds of guile.
And we, who crave so much to know, crave so little but knowing.
Some of us wish to know Nature most; those are the scientists.
Others, the saints and philosophers, wish to know God. Both are
alike in their hearts, yes, in spite of their quarrels. Both
seek to assuage to no end, the old simian thirst.