Oh, the helplessness and irresponsibility of the human mind! There is no spontaneity, no originality, only the dead level of the machine. How impossible it is for us to think, to discover anything unassisted, to perceive anything after it has been pointed out to us even, if it is a little different from what we are used to! This, it seems to me, is one of the most pathetic things in all this world—this illimitable impotence, this powerlessness to inspect things from any other point of view than the one we inherit when we come into the world; to be a knave or lunatic (or the next thing to it), and never have the slightest suspicion of the fact. The human mind will certainly not always be this way. It will surely be different some time. It seems incredible that the planet will drag along in disgrace this way forever. The men of Europe and America are not so primitive as the junglemen, and the junglemen are superior in some respects to the quadrupeds and reptiles, and this gives reason for a little hope. _But when that is the question, when will it be? In what distant time will the Golden Dream of our prophetic hours come to this poor darkened larva of a world?_ Ages upon ages after our little existences have gone out, and the detritus of our wasted bodies has wandered long in the labyrinths of the sod or been sown by aimless gusts over our native hills. 1. Hamley: _Our Poor Relations_; Boston, 1872. 2. I have many times seen cows chased all over their native premises, round and round, through fields and barnyards, across streams and over fences—chased until the poor things were utterly exhausted, and whipped and beaten until their faces and backs were covered with wounds—before they could be compelled to leave for ever the old farm where they had been born and raised. X. Anthropocentric Ethics.