"Nothing that resembles it.At a future time I will examine what man calls his mind and give you the details of that chaos, then you will see and understand.Men have nothing in common with me--there is no point of contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense.Only the Moral Sense.I will show you what I mean.Here is a red spider, not so big as a pin's head.Can you imagine an elephant being interested in him--caring whether he is happy or isn't, or whether he is wealthy or poor, or whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, or whether his mother is sick or well, or whether he is looked up to in society or not, or whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert him, or whether his hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions fail, or whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a foreign land? These things can never be important to the elephant; they 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; Iam 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.Aman 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 Iretain.
"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 limited to his own august order.If it fell upon one of your race for only an instant, it would consume its object to ashes.No, we cannot love men, but we can be harmlessly indifferent to them; we can also like them, sometimes.I like you and the boys, I like Father Peter, and for your sakes I am doing all these things for the villagers."He saw that I was thinking a sarcasm, and he explained his position.
"I have wrought well for the villagers, though it does not look like it on the surface.Your race never know good fortune from ill.They are always mistaking the one for the other.It is because they cannot see into the future.What I am doing for the villagers will bear good fruit some day; in some cases to themselves; in others, to unborn generations of men.No one will ever know that I was the cause, but it will be none the less true, for all that.Among you boys you have a game: you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push a brick, it knocks its neighbor over, the neighbor knocks over the next brick--and so on till all the row is prostrate.That is human life.A child's first act knocks over the initial brick, and the rest will follow inexorably.If you could see into the future, as I can, you would see everything that was going to happen to that creature; for nothing can change the order of its life after the first event has determined it.That is, nothing will change it, because each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another, and so on to the end, and the seer can look forward down the line and see just when each act is to have birth, from cradle to grave.""Does God order the career?"
"Foreordain it? No.The man's circumstances and environment order it.
His first act determines the second and all that follow after.But suppose, for argument's sake, that the man should skip one of these acts;an apparently trifling one, for instance; suppose that it had been appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and second and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn't go.