are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies to
the microscopic size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the
elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spider--he cannot get
down to that remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant is
indifferent; I am indifferent. The elephant would not take the trouble
to do the spider an ill turn; if he took the notion he might do him a
good turn, if it came in his way and cost nothing. I have done men good
service, but no ill turns.

"The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power,
intellect, and dignity the one creature is separated from the other by
a distance which is simply astronomical. Yet in these, as in all
qualities, man is immeasurably further below me than is the wee spider
below the elephant.

"Man's mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little
trivialities together and gets a result--such as it is. My mind creates!
Do you get the force of that? Creates anything it desires--and in
a moment. Creates without material. Creates fluids, solids,
colors--anything, everything--out of the airy nothing which is called
Thought. A man imagines a silk thread, imagines a machine to make it,
imagines a picture, then by weeks of labor embroiders it on canvas
with the thread. I think the whole thing, and in a moment it is before
you--created.

"I think a poem, music, the record of a game of chess--anything--and
it is there. This is the immortal mind--nothing is beyond its reach.
Nothing can obstruct my vision; the rocks are transparent to me, and
darkness is daylight. I do not need to open a book; I take the whole of
its contents into my mind at a single glance, through the cover; and in
a million years I could not forget a single word of it, or its place in
the volume. Nothing goes on in the skull of man, bird, fish, insect, or
other creature which can be hidden from me. I pierce the learned man's
brain with a single glance, and the treasures which cost him threescore
years to accumulate are mine; he can forget, and he does forget, but I
retain.

"Now, then, I perceive by your thoughts that you are understanding me
fairly well. Let us proceed. Circumstances might so fall out that the
elephant could like the spider--supposing he can see it--but he could
not love it. His love is for his own kind--for his equals. An
angel's love is sublime, adorable, divine, beyond the imagination of
man--infinitely beyond it! But it is limit