How fearful we all are of wasting our lives, yet so rarely fearful for the results of the ceaseless activity with which we crowd them
But Hercules’ words are full of suggestiveness. Is our boasted human reason really less adequate to the needs of our life than is what we call the instinct, this thing that looks so much more reasonable than our reason, of the lower orders? What if, after all, we are making a desperate mistake in supposing that it is this faculty which we call reason that distinguishes us from the brute creation?
It is because the bees and the other dumb creatures have nothing more than this measure of reason which we call instinct, that it serves them perfectly. Man has something else, that draws him higher; that prompts him further. But alas for us! With the destiny to live perfectly as human beings, we yet long for the restrictions through which we may live perfectly as the beasts. We seek our lessons from the brutes while the Eternal waits to teach us. We cannot live like the beasts. The divine human spark within us will not let us. We must live higher than they or we shall live lower, for our perfection of order is infinitely higher than theirs, and our failure immeasurably lower than they can sink
But we go on, we modern Athenians, seeking to ameliorate the conditions we have brought upon society by our own stupid disobedience and inhumanity, and only now and then do we have a faint suspicion that our newest thoughts are but mere rephrasings of ideas old as thought itself
Men get these new sets of phrases and dress therein the ideas that underlie the universe. We apply the terms of science to the old faiths and think we have invented a new religion. We find new names for God Himself, and believe ourselves to have discovered a new life-principle
