sees the whole universe as a scheme of more or less useful, pleasurable
and interesting things concentrated upon her sensitive and interesting
personality. With a sinuous determination she evades disagreeables and
pursues delights; life is to her quite clearly and simply a succession
of pleasures, sensations and interests, among which interests there
happen to be--kittens!

And this way of regarding life is by no means confined to animals and
savages. I would even go so far as to suggest that it is only within
the last hundred years that any considerable number of thoughtful
people have come to look at life steadily and consistently as being
shaped to this form, to the form of a series of births, growths and
births. The most general truths are those last apprehended. The
universal fact of gravitation, for example, which pervades all being,
received its complete recognition scarcely two hundred years ago. And
again children and savages live in air, breathe air, are saturated with
air, die for five minutes' need of it, and never definitely realize
there is such a thing as air at all. The vast mass of human expression
in act and art and literature takes a narrower view than we have here
formulated; it presents each man not only as isolated from and
antagonized with the world about him, but as cut off sharply and
definitely from the past before he lived and the future after he is
dead; it puts what is, in relation to the view we have taken, a
disproportionate amount of stress upon his egotism, upon the pursuit of
his self-interest and his personal virtue and his personal fancies, and
it ignores the fact, the familiar rediscovery which the nineteenth
century has achieved, that he is after all only the transitory
custodian of an undying gift of life, an inheritor under conditions,
the momentary voice and interpreter of a being that springs from the
dawn of time and lives in offspring and thought and material