“But the normal human being makes children like a beast mated by law.
“Look at this woman! Isn’t it abominable to think that this jewel, this pearl born to be beautiful, admired, fêted and adored, has passed eleven years of her life in giving heirs to the Comte de Mascaret!”
Bernard Grandin said, laughing:
“There’s a good deal of truth in that; but few people would understand you.”
Salins became excited.
“Do you know my conception of God?” said he. “A monstrous creative organ unknown to us, who sows millions of worlds through space as a single fish lays eggs in the sea. He creates because that is his God function: but he is ignorant of what he does, senselessly prolific, unconscious of the multitudinous combinations produced by his scattered germs. Human thought is a happy little accident born of the chances of his fecundities, a local accident, passing and unforeseen, condemned to disappear with the earth, and to begin again, perhaps, here or elsewhere, the same or different, with the new combinations of the eternal re-beginnings. It is due to this, to this little accident of intelligence, that we exist ill at ease in a state of being not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive, house, nourish and content thinking beings, and it is due to this too that we have to fight without rest, such of us as are truly refined and civilised, against what are still called the designs of Providence.”
Grandin, who was listening to him attentively, knowing of old the startling leaps of his imagination, asked him:
“So you believe that human thought is a spontaneous product of the blind parturition of God?”
“Why not? A fortuitous function of the nervous centres of our brains, similar to unforeseen chemical actions due to new combinations, similar too to a manifestation of electricity, created by friction or by unexpected contiguities, in short to all the phenomena engendered by the infinite and fecund fermentations of living matter.
“But, my dear, the proof leaps to the eye of anyone who looks round him. If human thought, willed by a conscious creator, had been intended to be that which it has become, quite different from the thought and the resignation of the beasts, exacting, questing, disturbed, tormented, would the world created to receive the creatures that we are today have been this uncomfortable little park for small beasties, this salad bed, this stony, spherical, sylvan kitchen-garden, where your shortsighted Providence had destined us to live naked, in caves or under trees, nourished by the murdered flesh of the animals, our brothers, or the raw vegetables growing in sun and rain?
“But it only requires a second’s reflection to realise that this world is not made for creatures like us. Thought, hatched and developed by a miraculous quality of the nerves of our brain cells, quite powerless, ignorant and confused as it is and will always remain, makes us all intellectuals of the world of the ideal, and miserable exiles in this world.
“Contemplate this world, in the state in which God gave it to the beings who dwell thereon. Is it not visibly and solely designed, planted and wooded for animals? What is there for us? Nothing. And for them, all: caves, trees, leafy places, rivers, watering-places, food and drink. So that fastidious people like me are never happy there. Only men who approximate to the brutes are content and satisfied. But the others, poets, squeamish creatures, dreamers, seekers, restless beings … oh, poor wretches!
“I eat cabbages and carrots, dammit, onions, turnips and radishes, because we have been constrained to accustom ourselves to them, even to acquire a taste for them, and because nothing else grows, but these things are a food fit only for rabbits and goats, as grass and clover are food for horses and cows. When I look at the ears of a field of ripe corn I don’t doubt but that it has germinated in the soil for the beaks of sparrows and larks, but not for my mouth. So when I masticate bread I am robbing the birds, as I am robbing the weasel and the fox in eating poultry. Are not quail, pigeon and partridge the natural prey of the hawk; sheep, venison and beef the prey of the great carnivorous beasts, rather than meats fattened for us to be served roasted with truffles that have been disinterred especially for us by the pigs?
“Animals have nothing to do but live here, my dear. They are in their own place, sheltered and fed, they have only to browse or hunt or eat each other, following the promptings of their instincts, for God never foresaw gentleness and peaceful way: he foresaw only the death of creatures impelled to destroy and devour each other.
“As for us! Oh, we have had to use labour, effort, patience, invention, imagination, industry, talent, and genius to make this root-bound stony soil something like a dwelling-place. Think what we have done, in spite of nature, in opposition to nature, to establish ourselves in barely tolerable conditions, hardly decent, hardly comfortable, hardly elegant, unworthy of us.
“And the more civilised, intelligent and refined we are, the more we must vanquish and tame the animal instinct that represents the will of God in us.
“Consider how we have had to invent civilisation, which includes so many things, so very many things of all kinds, from socks to telephones. Think of all the
