But the old dragon of creation, who fathered us all, didn’t have an idea in his head. Plato was prepared. He popped the Logos into the mouth of the dragon, and the serpent of eternity was rounded off. The old dragon, ugly and venomous, wore yet the precious jewel of the Platonic idea in his head. Unable to find the dragon wholesale, modern philosophy sets up a retail shop. You can’t lay salt on the old scoundrel’s tail, because, of course, he’s got it in his mouth, according to postulate. He doesn’t seem to be sprawling in his old lair, across the heavens. In fact, he appears to have vamoosed. Perhaps, instead of being one big old boy, he is really an infinite number of little tiny boys: atoms, electrons, units of force or energy, tiny little birds all spinning with their tails in their beaks. Just the same in detail as in the gross. Nothing will come out of the egg that isn’t in it. Evolution sings away at the same old song. Out of the amœba, or some such old-fashioned entity, the dragon of evolved life stretches himself enormous and more enormous, only, at last, to return each time, and put his tail into his own mouth, and be an amœba once more. The amœba, or the electron, or whatever it may lately be--the rose would be just as scentless--is the constant, from which all manifest living creation starts out, and to which it all returns. There was a time when man was not, nor monkey, nor cow, not catfish. But the amœba (or the electron, or the atom, or whatever it is) always was and always will be. Boom! tiddy-ra-ta! Boom! Boom! tiddy-ra-ta! Boom! How do you know? How does anyone know, what always was or wasn’t? Bunk of geology, and strata, and all that, biology or evolution. “One, two, three four five, Catch a little fish alive. Six, seven, eight nine ten, I have let him go again....” Bunk of beginnings and of ends, and heads and tails. Why does man always want to know so damned much? Or rather, so damned little? If he can’t draw a ring round creation, and fasten the serpent’s tail into its mouth with the padlock of one final clinching idea, then creation can go to hell, as far as man is concerned. There is such a thing as life, or life energy. We know, because we’ve got it, or had it. It isn’t a constant. It comes and it goes. But we _want_ it. This I think is incontestable. More than anything else in the world, we want to have life, and life-energy abundant in us. We think if we eat yeast, vitamines and proteids, we’re sure of it. We’re had. We diddle ourselves for the million millionth time. What we want is life, and life-energy inside us. Where it comes from, or what it is, we don’t know, and never shall. It is the capital X of all our knowledge. But we want it, we must have it. It is the all in all. This we know, now, for good and all: that which is good, and moral, is that which brings into us a stronger, deeper flow of life and life-energy: evil is that which impairs the life-flow.