e argue, after all,--our
nerves, for instance,--the mentalized condition of our organs. And
then, of course, there is the superior quality of our gray matter.
When we find ourselves obliged to appeal in this pathetic way from the
judgment of the brutes, or of those who, like them, insist on looking
at us in the mere ordinary, observing, scientific, realistic fashion,
we hint at our mysteriousness--a kind of mesh of mysticism there is in
us. We tell them it cannot really be seen from the outside, how well
our bodies work. We do not put it in so many words, but what we mean
is, that we need to be cut up to be appreciated, or seen in the large,
or in our more infinite relations. Our matter may not be very well
arranged on us, perhaps, but we flatter ourselves that there is a
superior unseen spiritual quality in it. It takes seers or surgeons to
appreciate us--more of the same sort, etc. In the meantime (no man can
deny the way things look) here we all are, with our queer, pale,
little stretched-out legs and arms and things, floundering about on
this earth, without even our clothes on, covering ourselves as best we
can. And what could really be funnier than a human body living before
The Great Sun under its frame of wood and glass, all winter and all
summer ... strange and bleached-looking, like celery, grown almost
always under cloth, kept in the kind of cellar of cotton or wool it
likes for itself, moving about or being moved about, the way it is, in
thousands of queer, dependent, helpless-looking ways? The earth, we
can well believe, as we go up and down in it is full of soft laughter
at us. One cannot so much as go in swimming without feeling the fishes
peeking around the rocks, getting their fun out of us in some still,
underworld sort of way. We cannot help--a great many of us--feeling,
in a subtle way, strange and embarrassed in the woods. Most of us, it
is true, manage to keep up a look of being fairly at home on the
planet by huddling up and living in cities. By dint of staying
carefully away from the other animals, keeping pretty much by
ourselves, and whistling a good deal and making a great deal of noise,
called civilization, we keep each other in countenance after a
fashion, but we are really the guys of the animal world, and when we
stop to think of it and face the facts and see ourselves as the others
see us, we cannot help acknowledging it. I, for one, rather like to,
and have it done with.

It is getting t