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We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of
animals. Remote from a universal nature, and living by
complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature
through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather
magnified and the whole image in distortion.
We patronize them for their
incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far
below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.
For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older
and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted
with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living
by voices we shall never hear.
They are not brethren,
they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with
ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the
splendor and travail of the earth. |
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