If you could be divided into your component animal parts there would be a menagerie in your house, and you, Smith or Jones, would be missing. That thing we call a "soul" would be floating around, impalpable, looking for its house to live in. ----
Of course, you can see the animal make-up in your neighbor more readily than in yourself.
How do men describe each other? Do they not speak as follows, and mean exactly what they say
"He is as sly as a fox."
"He eats like a pig."
"He has dog-like faithfulness."
"He is as brave as a lion."
"He is as treacherous as a snake."
"He was as hungry as a wolf," etc. ----
Our good and our bad qualities alike are mapped out in our humble animal relations.
The horse stands for ambition, which strives and suffers in silence. The dog represents friendship, which suffers and sacrifices much, but whines loudly when injured.
We have no doubt that of the twelve pa.s.sions which enter into Fourier"s complex a.n.a.lysis of man each has its prototype in some one animal. ----
To rebel at the animal combination which makes up a man would be folly.
The Maker of us all, from ants to anti-imperialists, naturally gathered together the various parts in lower animal form before finishing the work in man.
A harmoniously balanced mixture of all the animals is calculated undoubtedly to produce the perfect man. ----
Therefore, study your animal make-up. a.n.a.lyze honestly and intelligently the so-called "lower" creatures from whom you derive your mental characteristics. If you have not yet done so, study at once some good work on embryology, and learn with amazement and awe of your marvelous transformations before birth.
Then do your best to control the menagerie that is at work in your mind.
Stultify Mr. Pig, if he is too prominent. Circ.u.mvent Mr. Fox, if he tries to rule you and make of you a mere cunning machine.
Do not let your Old Dog Tray qualities of friendship lead to your being made a fool.
In short, study carefully the animal qualities that make up your temperament and prove in your own person the falseness of Napoleon"s irritating statement that a man"s temperament can never be changed by himself. ----
It may interest you to note that when man becomes insane, the fact is at once made apparent that his mind, dethroned, had acted as the ruler of a savage menagerie. Many crazy men imagine themselves animals of one sort or another. Nearly all of them display the grossest animal qualities, once their mind is deranged. Women of the greatest refinement sink into dreadful animalism when insane. Heine tells of a constable who, in his boyhood, ruled his native city. One fine day "this constable suddenly went crazy, * * * and thereupon he began to roar like a lion or squall like a cat."
Heine remarks with calculated naivete: "We little boys were greatly delighted at the old fellow, and trooped, yelling, after him until he was carried off to a madhouse."
There is, by the way, much of the natural animal in "little boys." It takes years to make a fairly reasonable creature of a young human. For that reason many ignorant parents are foolishly distressed at juvenile displays of animalism, which are perfectly natural. ----
The same Heine, whose writings you ought not to neglect, describes beautifully a human menagerie. We"ll quote that, and then let you off for the day. Heine was living in Paris in the forties, and used to visit a curious revolutionary freak named Ludwig Borne. Of this man"s house Heine wrote:
"I found in his salon such a menagerie of people as can hardly be found in the Jardin des Plantes (the Paris zoological garden).
In the background several polar bears were crouching, who smoked and hardly ever spoke, except to growl out now and then a real fatherland "Donnerwetter" in a deep ba.s.s voice. Near them was squatting a Polish wolf in a red cap, who occasionally yelped out a silly, wild remark in a hoa.r.s.e tone. There, too, I found a French monkey, one of the most hideous creatures I ever saw; he kept up a series of grimaces, each of which seemed more lovely than the last," etc.
If Heine"s polar bears, wolf and monkey had studied themselves, as we advise you to study yourself, they might have escaped the sarcasm of the sharpest tongue ever born in or out of Germany.
FROM MAMMOTHS TO MOSQUITOES --FROM MURDER TO HYPOCRISY
You are standing with this writer on the edge of a stagnant pool in Northern Europe, fifty thousand years ago.
The trees are strange, the life is strange. There are certain familiar things visible. For instance, on one side of the pool there is an angry mammoth, with long hair and long tusks.
He is a huge, savage beast, monster of power with tiny, vicious eyes, and a curled trunk of unlimited force.
You recognize his resemblance to the modern elephant, and you feel at home.
In the middle of the pool, standing up to his waist in water, there is another queer creature. He has long, red hair, and through his lips you can see that in his rage he is grinding a large set of teeth with the canine incisors abnormally developed.
He is a s.h.a.ggy, savage-looking brute, with a b.l.o.o.d.y and an apprehensive eye. You will recognize him as a human being.
As he stands in the pool there is a familiar slap of his right hand on the back of his left shoulder--he has killed a mosquito.
That is the picture. We leave the mammoth, primitive man and the mosquito to settle their troubles.
We call your attention to this. If you really witnessed that scene you would have undoubtedly said to the red-eyed savage in the pool:
"My friend, you can kill that mosquito easily, and possibly in time you will kill all the mosquitoes. But that MAMMOTH is a problem that you will not solve for a long time, if ever."
Had you known that the red-eyed human animal in the middle of the pool was sent there by Providence to regulate the globe, cultivate it, destroy the noxious forms of animal life, etc., you would certainly have believed that that person would have got rid of the mosquitoes long before getting rid of the mammoth.
As a matter of fact, the mammoth has gone, the woolly rhinoceros of Northern Europe has gone, the sabre-toothed tiger prowls no more. Even wolves have disappeared, and the mosquito is still flourishing in his millions and billions.
We have only just learned that it is he who gives us malaria, that it is he who spreads yellow fever and undoubtedly many other diseases.
The human race, which in its earliest, incapable childhood easily managed to dispose of the mammoth and his huge fellow-monsters, still stands helpless before the little mosquito, deadliest of VISIBLE animals on earth.
Is it not interesting to realize that the hardest work of the human race, as of the individual, is the most minute work; that the intellect, which easily copes with the heaviest and the biggest problems, is baffled by the tiniest?
Ultimately, and perhaps soon, we shall send the mosquito, the house-fly and the other buzzing pirates to join in the grave"s silence their big brothers--the mastodon and the rest.
Then our fight will begin against invisible animal life, against the actual microbes of disease which the mosquito has been carrying around and injecting into us. It is a long fight, but, of course, we shall win it. ----
And is it not interesting, also, to reflect that in the moral, as in the physical, battles of life man requires the longest time to deal with his smallest enemies?
Morally we are still primitive savages. We are still combating murder, arson, theft--like the cave-dweller fighting the physical mammoth, we are fighting the mammoths of moral deformity.
Eventually they will disappear. Murder will be unknown, and theft, rendered unnecessary by decent social organization, will have disappeared also.
At that time we shall be fighting the smaller and more dangerous, more elusive and more persistent moral troubles--HYPOCRISY, CONCEIT, UNCHARITABLENESS. These are the mosquitoes and flies of the world of immorality that will pursue us when the big fellows--murder and theft--shall have been killed off.