scles--even though
life and comfort depend upon it--a still vaster majority shirk the
disciplined toil and tension of the mind, which, if it have real
purpose, makes little of the only rewards that spur men to muscular
labor.

The men who have really thought and labored and struggled for the
abstract jewel of truth, and to beautify and make happy the world we
live in, are, to the masses of indolent, ignorant, selfish human
beings that have swarmed through the ages, as parasites upon some huge
animal. The mass of humanity, considered as a whole, separated from
these restless and stinging parasites, observed through the
perspective of history, tradition and science, resembles nothing so
much as some monstrous dull-brained and gloomy animal, alternately
dozing and raging through the centuries, now as if stupefied in its
own bulk or then as if furious with the madness of brute power. In
fact, though mankind have achieved the dignity of a history that fills
the thoughtful with wonder, yet as a mass they are filled with as much
violence, injustice, ruthlessness and selfishness as if it were but
yesterday they had emerged from the primitive struggles with wild
beasts, the tangled forests, the trackless mountains, and the pitiless
elements, and yet stood flushed with savage exultation but dull with
physical weariness. In that vast human bulk that sprawls over every
continent, the primitive ferocity still exists, veiled perhaps under
familiar livery and uniform, but untamed by centuries of training. It
is this gloomy mass, saturated with superstitious cowardice, savage
with the selfish instinct of greed, or dull with the languor of gorged
and exhausted passion, that deliberates not in words or thought, but
in some impenetrable free-masonry of instinct like that which beggars
illustrate when they silently display their deformities and
mutilations as the most eloquent appeals. This gloomy mass is at once
the instigator and the instrument of mortal destiny. Individuals may
escape for a time, but they must eventually fall or lift the mass to
meet them.

The most profound philosophers and most patient students know as
little of this silent, gloomy human force as geographers know of the
archipelagoes of the Antarctic. The philosopher begins with pure
reason and expands it; the student delves into the records of other
students; in unfathomable depths below both are the myriads who eat,
drink, sleep and seek their prey as their primi