ties go by the board. The minute he tackles the living Little
People he chucks theories and bucks conditions.

"Suppose I tell the truth as I see it: that most so-called authorities
are like cats chasing their tails--because they accept theories that
have never been really proven, run after them, and so never get
anywhere? And that facts dug up in the open under the sunlight don't
always fit in with notions hatched out in libraries under the electric
light?

"Suppose I say that after they've run everything down to that plasma
they're so fond of beginning and ending with, there is still something
behind it all their theories can't explain away? Protoplasm doesn't
explain Life any more than the battery explains electricity. Instinct?
Evolution? The survival of the fittest? Well, nothing is tagged for
fair, and I'm more than willing to be shown. For the more I find out
from the living things themselves,--you can't get truth from death,
you've got to get it from life--the more self-evident it seems to me
that to exist at all insects must have arrived on the scene complete,
handfinished, with the union label of the Great Workshop on them by
way of a trade-mark."

"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, one God, world
without end, Amen!" said I, smiling. I have never thought it necessary
to explain or excuse the Creator. God is; things are.

But he shook his head, wrinkling his forehead painfully. "I wish I
_knew_," said he, wistfully. "You're satisfied to believe, but I have
got to know. Oh, great Power behind Things, I want to know! I want to
_know_!"

Ah, but I also do most passionately wish to know! If, however, the
Insect has taught me anything in my lifelong study of it, it is to
recognize the Unknowable, to know there is that which I cannot hope to
know. But if under the law of its world, so different from ours and
yet so alike because so inevitable, the Insect must move in a fixed
circle within which it is safe, a circle whose very limitation
preserves it from error and thus from destruction, may not a like
fixed circle beyond which _we_ may not penetrate preserve us, too? Are
these mountain peaks of the Unknowable, the Impassable, which
encompass the skyline of our humanity, these heights so mysterious and
so unscalable, not rather bulwarks between man's pride and the abyss?

Something of this I said to the Butterfly Man, and he nodded, but did
not answer. He fell into a brown study; then plung