Yes, and even if we are permitted to have a long reign, and are not laid away with the failures, are we a success?
We need so much spiritual insight, and we have so little. Our airships may some day float over the hills of Arcturus, but how will that help us if we cannot find the soul of the world? Is that soul alive and loving? or cruel? or callous? or dead?
We have no sure vision. Hopes, guesses, beliefs--that is all.
There are sounds we are deaf to, there are strange sights invisible to us. There are whole realms of splendor, it may be, of which we are heedless; and which we are as blind to as ants to the call of the sea.
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 princ.i.p.al 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 appet.i.te? If the ants were earth"s lords they would make no more use of their lordship than to learn and enjoy every possible method of toiling. 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 G.o.d. Both are alike in their hearts, yes, in spite of their quarrels. Both seek to a.s.suage, to no end, the old simian thirst.
If we wanted to _be_ G.o.ds--but ah, can we grasp that ambition?
A NOTE ON THE TYPE IN WHICH THIS BOOK IS SET
_The text of this book was set on the linotype in Baskerville. The punches for this face were cut under the supervision of George W.
Jones, an eminent English printer. Linotype Baskerville is a facsimile cutting from type cast from the original matrices of a face designed by John Baskerville. The original face was the forerunner of the "modern"
group of type faces.
-- John Baskerville (1706-75), of Birmingham, England, a writing-master, with a special renown for cutting inscriptions in stone, began experimenting about 1750 with punch-cutting and making typographical material. It was not until 1757 that he published his first work, a Virgil in royal quarto, with great-primer letters. This was followed by his famous editions of Milton, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and several Latin cla.s.sic authors. His types, at first criticized as unnecessarily slender, delicate, and feminine, in time were recognized as both distinct and elegant, and both his types and his printing were greatly admired. Printers, however, preferred the stronger types of Caslon, and Baskerville before his death repented of having attempted the business of printing. For four years after his death his widow continued to conduct his business. She then sold all his punches and matrices to the Societe Litteraire-typographique, which used some of the types for the sumptuous Kehl edition of Voltaire"s works in seventy volumes.--_
COMPOSED, PRINTED AND BOUND BY H. WOLFF, NEW YORK. PAPER MADE BY P. F. GLATFELTER & CO., SPRING GROVE, PA.