tools of stone and bone,
building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw,
domesticating the wild grasses and meadow-roots, fathering them to become
the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of
succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to
store, beating out the fibres of plants to spin into thread and to weave
into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making
markets and trade-routes, building boats, and founding navigation--ay,
and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they
became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever
seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans
might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy
all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else
destroy them.

I was that man in all his births and endeavours. I am that man to-day,
waiting my due death by the law that I helped to devise many a thousand
years ago, and by which I have died many times before this, many times.
And as I contemplate this vast past history of me, I find several great
and splendid influences, and, chiefest of these, the love of woman, man's
love for the woman of his kind. I see myself, the one man, the lover,
always the lover. Yes, also was I the great fighter, but somehow it
seems to me as I sit here and evenly balance it all, that I was, more
than aught else, the great lover. It was because I loved greatly that I
was the great fighter.

Sometimes I think that the story of man is the story of the love of
woman. This memory of all my past that I write now is the memory of my
love of woman. Ever, in the ten thousand lives and guises, I loved her.
I love her now. My sleep is fraught with her; my waking fancies, no
matter whence they start, lead me always to her. There is no escaping
her, that eternal, splendid, ever-resplendent figure of woman.

Oh, make no mistake. I am no callow, ardent youth. I am an elderly man,
broken in health and body, and soon to die. I am a scientist and a
philosopher. I, as all the generations of philosophers before me, know
woman for what she is--her weaknesses, and meannesses, and immodesties,
and ignobilities, her earth-bound feet, and her eyes that have never seen
the stars. But--and the everlasting, irrefragable fact remains: _Her
feet are beautiful, her eyes are beautiful, her arms a