an idea or a headache.

"Other creatures don't do it," he replied, with a discouraged
expression. "Are any other beings ever found in such masses, but
vermin? Aimless, staring, vacant-minded,--look at them! I can get no
sense whatever of individual worth, or of value in men as a race, when
I see them like this. It makes one almost despair of civilization."

I thought this over for awhile, to get in touch with his attitude. I
myself feel differently at different times about us human-beings:
sometimes I get pretty indignant when we are attacked (for there is
altogether too much abuse of us by spectator philosophers) and yet at
other times I too feel like a spectator, an alien: but even then I had
never felt so alien or despairing as Potter. I cast about for the
probable cause of our difference. "Let's remember," I said, "it's a
simian civilization."

Potter was staring disgustedly at some vaudeville sign-boards.

"Yes," I said, "those for example are distinctively simian. Why should
you feel disappointment at something inevitable?" And I went on to
argue that it wasn't as though we were descended from eagles for
instance, instead of (broadly speaking) from ape-like or monkeyish
beings. Being of simian stock, we had simian traits. Our development
naturally bore the marks of our origin. If we had inherited our
dispositions from eagles we should have loathed vaudeville. But as
cousins of the Bandarlog, we loved it. What could you expect?

[Illustration: Descended from eagles]

_TWO_

If we had been made directly from clay, the way it says in the Bible,
and had therefore inherited no intermediate characteristics,--if a god,
or some principle of growth, had gone that way to work with us, he or
it might have molded us into much more splendid forms.

But considering our simian descent, it has done very well. The only
people who are disappointed in us are those who still believe that clay
story. Or who--unconsciously--still let it color their thinking.

* * * * *

There certainly seems to be a power at work in the world, by virtue of
which every living thing grows and develops. And it tends toward
splendor. Seeds become trees, and weak little nations grow great. But
the push or the force that is doing this, the yeast as it were, has to
work in and on certain definite kinds of material. Because this yeast
is in us, there may be great and undreamed of possibilities awaitin