We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.
Any man may make a mistake; none but a fool will stick to it. Second thoughts are best as the proverb says.
[Lat., Cujusvis hominis est errare; nullius, nisi insipientis, in errore perseverae. Posteriores enim cogitationes (ut aiunt) sapientiores solent esse.]
Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite, and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless, endless.
Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.
I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history--whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline.
The nature of Christ is, I grant it, from one end to another, a web of mysteries; but this mysteriousness does not correspond to the difficulties which all existence contains. Let it be rejected, and the whole world is an enigma; let it be accepted, and we possess a wonderful explanation of the history of man.
We consider that any man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia Reels without losing his grip may be depended upon in any kind of musical emergency.
That every will must consider every other will its equal would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.
Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist.
Shower on him every blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick.