what a man says, comes to being repeated, to being made
universal, to being jammed down on the rest of us, that the lie in it
begins to work out.

Let us let everybody alone and be ready to find things out just for
ourselves.

Here is this big, frivolous, gentle elephant, for instance, poking his
huge, inquiring trunk into baby carriages. He is certainly too glorious,
too profound, a personage to do such things! It does seem a little
unworthy to me, as I have been sitting here and watching him from this
park bench, for a noble, solemn being like the elephant--a kind of
cathedral of a beast, to be as deeply interested as he is in peanuts.

He looms up before me once more. I look up a little closer--look into
his little, shrewd eyes--and, after all, what do I know about him?

And I watch the camels with the happy, dazed children on their backs, go
by with soft and drifting feet. Do I suppose I understand camels? Or I
follow the crowd. I find myself at last with that huge, hushed,
sympathetic congregation at the 4 P.M. service, watching the lions eat.

Everything does seem very much mixed up when one brings one's
Sociological Society dogmas, and one's little neat, impeccable row of
principles to the test of watching the lions eat!

Possibly people are as different from one another inside--in their souls
at least--as different as these animals are.

It is true, of course, that as we go about, people do have a plausible
way in this world--all these other people, of looking like us.

But they are different inside.

If one could stand on a platform as one was about to speak and could
really see the souls of any audience--say of a thousand people--lying
out there before one, they would be a menagerie beside which, O Gentle
Reader, I dare to believe, Barnum and Bailey's menagerie would pale in
comparison.

But in a menagerie (perhaps you have noticed it, Gentle Reader) one
treats the animals seriously, and as if they were Individuals.

They are what they are.

Why not treat people's souls seriously?

It is true that people's souls, like the animals, are alike in a general
way. They all have in common (in spiritual things) organs of
observation, appropriation, digestion and organs of self-reproduction.

But these spiritual organs of digestion which they have are theirs.

And these organs of self-reproduction are for the purpose of reproducing
themselves and not us.

These are my reflections, or these try to be