His knowledge and understanding of their nature will remain at a minimum. Progressing on these lines, he will for ever be making things cease to be themselves without making them really his own. But if he reverse that process of experiment by encouraging things to be themselves, how varied and multitudinous will grow his consciousness of life, his appreciation of its finer shades, its delicacy, its grace, its adaptability, its vigour and its freedom. If his interest is in birds, how much more he will know of them, and find in them how much more of alertness and beauty, if he hang food for them outside his window, rather than cages for them within; if he will recognise that the beauty of a bird lies too largely in its wings, for caging to be anything but a contradiction of its true existence. If his interest is in animals, how far more he will learn of their resources and character, if he aims not at cowing them and causing them to flee from him in fear, but at encouraging them in all genuine and characteristic development. That does not mean teaching them to “perform” in painful and artificial ways--exploits which are always built up on processes of cruelty, and do not in the least reveal animal nature as it really is but only impose upon it a mask of concealment--anthropomorphic, full of conceit and self-flattery--the same fond thing which he did when he began making God also in his own image to worship it. There, indeed, in man’s shaping of God to be like himself, revengeful, deceitful, pompous, inconsiderate, unmerciful, one-sided and masculine; in making Him, too, a performer of tricks, so that in those attributes he might see himself reflected and stand enlarged in his own eyes--surely there more than in any other department of life has man by his foolish possessiveness brought to the human race poverty instead of wealth, a curse instead of a blessing. That is but one example of how this narrow possessiveness with which man set out to conquer heaven and earth wears thin and poor under the test of time, and leaves him in the end no standing monuments but just a heap of rubble on which to gaze--only that, or perhaps less--perhaps only desert sand. That failure of material ambitions stands immortalised for us in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”: I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive--stamped on these lifeless things-- The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear:-- ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away!”