“After the foregoing contemplation, we can easily see that each organism, according to its degree of development, has a particular environment in which all its desires can be most nearly satisfied. A savage, with his mental constitution, would find no delight in living a civilized life in an elegantly furnished residence; his position would not correspond with his faculties and desires, and before he could enjoy a splendid parlor, his desires will have to be changed. An ape would find no happiness in following the habits of a hog; and a hog could not live in the environment of a fish, neither could the masses of your people, with their present desires and amount of intelligence, if transferred to our world, enjoy the free, kind, and rich society of Mars. They would feel as awkward there as the savage would feel in your parlor. Intelligence, personal and ancestral, determines the whole course of animal activity. Every animal and every man acts just as good, and no better, as the amount of his intelligence compels him to act. And no one’s course of action, whether considered good or bad, can be changed permanently without the mental assimilation of additional knowledge. A clear and thorough knowledge of this important truth by all would forever banish every vestige of human cruelty from the face of the earth. “In conclusion of this topic, let me say that I am very glad that you requested me to give you our idea of truth and happiness. But, in order to avoid being misunderstood, allow me to explain one other point. I told you that an organism is completely happy only when all its desires are fully satisfied; but, as a whole, our desires can never be _completely_ satisfied. This, I think, can be best understood by bearing in mind that the higher beings according to the doctrine of evolution have been evolved from lower organisms by the pressure of environment, by competition, by the survival of the fittest. Our environment is continuously pressing us, by the survival of the fittest, etc., into higher and higher planes, which require a continuous adjustment of ourselves with our environment, and this continuous adjustment and pressure involves incomplete satisfaction. There will, then, always remain abundance of scope for our healthful ambition, both in the direction of physical structure and mental powers. No matter how physically perfect a person may be in bodily structure, strength, endurance and agility, we can conceive of one who is still his superior. And no matter how learned a person may be, his field of thought is always bounded; and this boundary always implies a region outside of the sphere of his thought, which can never be co-extensive and identical with infinity.” CHAPTER X. EXTERIOR OF THE “BIG-HOUSE.”