* * * * *

This was as far as the doctor had gotten, at the time that I met him;
and as I have lost touch with him since, I don't know how things were
afterward. His theory at the time was, that variety was good for
fidelity.

"So many of us feel this way, it may be in the blood," he concluded.
"Some creatures, such as wolves, are more serious; or perhaps more
cold-blooded. Never mate but once. Well--we're not wolves. We can't
make wolves our models. Of course we are not monkeys either, but at any
rate they are our cousins. Perhaps wolves can be continent without any
trouble at all, but it's harder for simians: it may affect their
nervous systems injuriously. If we want to know how to behave,
according to the way Nature made us, I say that with all due allowances
we should study the monkeys."

To be sure, these particular monkeys were living in idleness. This
corresponds to living in high social circles with us, where men do not
have to work, and lack some of the common incentives to home-building.
The experiment was not conclusive.

Still, even in low social circles--

_THIRTEEN_

Are we or are we not simians? It is no use for any man to try to think
anything else out until he has decided first of all where he stands on
that question. It is not only in love affairs: let us lay all that
aside for the moment. It is in ethics, economics, art, education,
philosophy, what-not. If we are fallen angels, we should go this road:
if we are super-apes, that.

"Our problem is not to discover what we ought to do if we were
different, but what we ought to do, being what we are. There is no end
to the beings we can imagine different from ourselves; but they do not
exist," and we cannot be sure they would be better than we if they did.
For, when we imagine them, we must imagine their entire environment;
they would have to be a part of some whole that does not now exist. And
that new whole, that new reality, being merely a figment of our little
minds, "would probably be inferior to the reality that is. For there is
this to be said in favor of reality: that we have nothing to compare it
with. Our fantasies are always incomplete, because they are fantasies.
And reality is complete. We cannot compare their incompleteness with
its completeness."[4]

[4] From an anonymous article entitled "Tolstoy and Russia" in
the _London Times_, Sept. 26, 1918.

Too many moralists begin with a disli