r us,
which had not been prepared to receive us, to lodge and feed us or to
satisfy reflecting beings, and we owe it to Him also that we have to
struggle without ceasing against what are still called the designs of
Providence, when we are really refined and civilized beings."

Grandin, who was listening to him attentively as he had long known the
surprising outbursts of his imagination, asked him: "Then you believe
that human thought is the spontaneous product of blind divine
generation?"

"Naturally! A fortuitous function of the nerve centres of our brain, like
the unforeseen chemical action due to new mixtures and similar also to a
charge of electricity, caused by friction or the unexpected proximity of
some substance, similar to all phenomena caused by the infinite and
fruitful fermentation of living matter.

"But, my dear fellow, the truth of this must be evident to any one who
looks about him. If the human mind, ordained by an omniscient Creator,
had been intended to be what it has become, exacting, inquiring,
agitated, tormented--so different from mere animal thought and
resignation--would the world which was created to receive the beings
which we now are have been this unpleasant little park for small game,
this salad patch, this wooded, rocky and spherical kitchen garden where
your improvident Providence had destined us to live naked, in caves or
under trees, nourished on the flesh of slaughtered animals, our brethren,
or on raw vegetables nourished by the sun and the rain?

"But it is sufficient to reflect for a moment, in order to understand
that this world was not made for such creatures as we are. Thought, which
is developed by a miracle in the nerves of the cells in our brain,
powerless, ignorant and confused as it is, and as it will always remain,
makes all of us who are intellectual beings eternal and wretched exiles
on earth.

"Look at this earth, as God has given it to those who inhabit it. Is it
not visibly and solely made, planted and covered with forests for the
sake of animals? What is there for us? Nothing. And for them, everything,
and they have nothing to do but to eat or go hunting and eat each other,
according to their instincts, for God never foresaw gentleness and
peaceable manners; He only foresaw the death of creatures which were bent
on destroying and devouring each other. Are not the quail, the pigeon and
the partridge the natural prey of the hawk? the sheep, the stag and the
ox tha