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.
