hery, which is another way of laughing at God and paying
homage, immodest homage, to beauty.

"But the normal man begets children just like an animal coupled with
another by law.

"Look at that woman! Is it not abominable to think that such a jewel,
such a pearl, born to be beautiful, admired, feted and adored, has spent
eleven years of her life in providing heirs for the Comte de Mascaret?"

Bernard Grandin replied with a laugh: "There is a great deal of truth in
all that, but very few people would understand you."

Salnis became more and more animated. "Do you know how I picture God
myself?" he said. "As an enormous, creative organ beyond our ken, who
scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would
deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates because it is His function
as God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing and is stupidly
prolific in His work and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds
which are produced by His scattered germs. The human mind is a lucky
little local, passing accident which was totally unforeseen, and
condemned to disappear with this earth and to recommence perhaps here or
elsewhere the same or different with fresh combinations of eternally new
beginnings. We owe it to this little lapse of intelligence on His part
that we are very uncomfortable in this world which was not made for 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
res