s incisive voice
and long forefinger carried with them conviction. He railed at the old
dictum that man was God's noblest work. The ordinary dog, he declared,
was more pleasing to the eye than the ordinary man, and the life of the
ordinary dog more to be envied than that of the ordinary man. Knowledge
only lifted us above the animal to be more buffeted by a complexity of
desires. The greatest thing in the world was self, and even the roots of
our goodness burrowed down into the depths where the ego was considering
its own comfort either in this world or the next. The proud man for whom
the universe was made was nothing but a fragile thread of memories
wrapped in soft tissue, packed away in a casket of bone, and made easily
portable by a pair of levers called legs. After countless ages spent on
earth seeking the true source of happiness men were still countless ages
from agreement. One half sought by goodness to attain happiness in
immortality; the other in Nirvana. One half found the shadow of
happiness in inertia, in stupefaction, a mere satisfying of physical
needs; the other in motion, joining in the mad procession which we call
so boastfully Progress. By accident of birth we were of the progressive
half and we paraded around and around, puffed up with pride of our little
accomplishment, until we fell exhausted and another took our place.

Judge Bundy nudged Doctor Todd again. Doctor Todd shook his head and
looked at the ceiling, as if to show that he found more of interest there
than in the speaker's words, and he held them there defiantly as the
Professor went on to controvert the optimistic philosophy which had been
taught at McGraw for so many years. That knowledge was the greatest
source of unhappiness was a bold dictum to hurl at a company of seekers
after it, but Henderson Blight had little respect for mere persons. The
ignorant animal did not exist, he argued; it was with knowledge that the
plague of ignorance came to man. A draught of knowledge was like a cup
of salt-water to the thirst, and the more we learned the less value we
could place on the things for which we labored. A man worked a lifetime
to obtain a peach-blow, and it crumbled to dust in his hands. What,
then, should we strive for?

At this question Doctor Todd brought his eyes down from the ceiling and
Judge Bundy lifted his from the red rug of the platform. The judge was
our great authority on striving. He had qualified himself