her life in providing heirs for the Count de Mascaret?"

Bernard Grandin replied with a laugh: "There is a great deal of truth in
all that, but very few people would understand you."

Salnis got more and more animated. "Do you know how I picture God
myself?" he said. "As am enormous creative organ, unknown to us, who
scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would
deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates, because it is His function as
God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing, and is stupidly
prolific in His work, and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds
which are produced by his scattered germs. Human thought is a lucky
little local, passing accident, which was totally unforeseen and
condemned to disappear with this earth, and to recommence perhaps here
or elsewhere, the same or different, with fresh combinations of
eternally new beginnings. We owe it to this slight accident which has
happened to His intellect, that we are very uncomfortable in this world,
which was not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive us, to
lodge and feed us or to satisfy reflecting beings, and we owe it to Him
also that we have to struggle without ceasing against what are still
called the designs of Providence, when we are really refined and
civilized beings."

Grandin, who was listening to him attentively, as he had long known the
surprising outbursts of his fancy, asked him: "Then you believe that
human thought is the spontaneous product of blind, divine parturition?"
"Naturally? A fortuitous function of the nerve-centers of our brain,
like some unforeseen chemical action which is due to new mixtures, and
which also resemble a product of electricity, caused by friction, or the
unexpected proximity of some substance, which lastly resemble the
phenomena caused by the infinite and fruitful fermentations of living
matter.

"But, my dear fellow, the truth of this must be evident to any one who
looks about him. If human thought, ordained by an omniscient Creator,
had been intended to be what it has become, altogether different from
mechanical thoughts and resignation, so exacting, inquiring, agitated,
tormented, would the world which was created to receive the beings which
we now are, have been this unpleasant little dwelling place for poor
fools, this salad plot, this rocky wooded and spherical kitchen garden
where your improvident Providence had destined us to live naked, in
caves or under