ou can. You
belong to a singular race. Every man is a suffering-machine and
a happiness-machine combined. The two functions work together
harmoniously, with a fine and delicate precision, on the give-and-take
principle. For every happiness turned out in the one department the
other stands ready to modify it with a sorrow or a pain--maybe a dozen.
In most cases the man's life is about equally divided between
happiness and unhappiness. When this is not the case the unhappiness
predominates--always; never the other. Sometimes a man's make and
disposition are such that his misery-machine is able to do nearly all
the business. Such a man goes through life almost ignorant of what
happiness is. Everything he touches, everything he does, brings a
misfortune upon him. You have seen such people? To that kind of a person
life is not an advantage, is it? It is only a disaster. Sometimes for an
hour's happiness a man's machinery makes him pay years of misery. Don't
you know that? It happens every now and then. I will give you a case
or two presently. Now the people of your village are nothing to me--you
know that, don't you?"

I did not like to speak out too flatly, so I said I had suspected it.

"Well, it is true that they are nothing to me. It is not possible
that they should be. The difference between them and me is abysmal,
immeasurable. They have no intellect."

"No intellect?"

"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