ercommunication of spirit with
spirit is at the beginning of all true understanding. It is the
beginning of silent cosmic wisdom: it may lead to knowing the ways of
that power called God.

_FIFTEEN_

Not content with the whole of a planet and themselves too, to study,
this race's children will also study the heavens. How few kinds of
creatures would ever have felt that impulse, and yet how natural it
will seem to these! How boundless and magnificent is the curiosity of
these tiny beings, who sit and peer out at the night from their small
whirling globe, considering deeply the huge cold seas of space, and
learning with wonderful skill to measure the stars.

In studies so vast, however, they are tested to the core. In these
great journeys the traveler must pay dear for his flaws. For it always
is when you most finely are exerting your strength that every weakness
you have most tells against you.

One weakness of the primates is the character of their self-consciousness.
This useful faculty, that can probe so deep, has one naive defect--it
relies too readily on its own findings. It doesn't suspect enough its
own unconfessed predilections. It assumes that it can be completely
impartial--but isn't. To instance an obvious way in which it will
betray them: beings that are intensely self-conscious and aware of
their selves, will also instinctively feel that their universe is. What
active principle animates the world, they will ask. A great blind
force? It is possible. But they will recoil from admitting any such
possibility. A self-aware purposeful force then? That is better! (More
simian.) "A blind force can't have been the creator of all. It's
unthinkable." Any theory _their_ brains find "unthinkable" cannot be
true.

(This is not to argue that it really is a blind force--or the opposite.
It is merely an instance of how little impartial they are.)

* * * * *

A second typical weakness of this race will come from their fears. They
are not either self-sufficing or gallant enough to travel great roads
without cringing,--clear-eyed, unafraid. They are finely made, but not
nobly made,--in that sense. They will therefore have a too urgent need
of religion. Few primates have the courage to face--alone--the still
inner mysteries: Infinity, Space and Time. They will think it too
terrible, they will feel it would turn them to water, to live through
unearthly moments of vision wi