“The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power, intellect, and dignity the one creature is separated from the other by a distance which is simply astronomical.  Yet in these, as in all qualities, man is immeasurably further below me than is the wee spider below the elephant.

“Man’s mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little trivialities together and gets a result—­such as it is.  My mind creates!  Do you get the force of that?  Creates anything it desires—­and in a moment.  Creates without material.  Creates fluids, solids, colors —­anything, everything—­out of the airy nothing which is called Thought.  A man imagines a silk thread, imagines a machine to make it, imagines a picture, then by weeks of labor embroiders it on canvas with the thread.  I think the whole thing, and in a moment it is before you—­created.

“I think a poem, music, the record of a game of chess—­anything—­and it is there.  This is the immortal mind—­nothing is beyond its reach.  Nothing can obstruct my vision; the rocks are transparent to me, and darkness is daylight.  I do not need to open a book; I take the whole of its contents into my mind at a single glance, through the cover; and in a million years I could not forget a single word of it, or its place in the volume.  Nothing goes on in the skull of man, bird, fish, insect, or other creature which can be hidden from me.  I pierce the learned man’s brain with a single glance, and the treasures which cost him threescore years to accumulate are mine; he can forget, and he does forget, but I retain.

“Now, then, I perceive by your thoughts that you are understanding me fairly well.  Let us proceed.  Circumstances might so fall out that the elephant could like the spider—­supposing he can see it—­but he could not love it.  His love is for his own kind—­for his equals.  An angel’s love is sublime, adorable, divine, beyond the imagination of man—­infinitely beyond it!  But it is limited to his own august order.  If it fell upon one of your race for only an instant, it would consume its object to ashes.  No, we cannot love men, but we can be harmlessly indifferent to them; we can also like them, sometimes.  I like you and the boys, I like Father Peter, and for your sakes I am doing all these things for the villagers.”

He saw that I was thinking a sarcasm, and he explained his position.

“I have wrought well for the villagers, though it does not look like it on the surface.  Your race never know good fortune from ill.  They are always mistaking the one for the other.  It is because they cannot see into the future.  What I am doing for the villagers will bear good fruit some day; in some cases to themselves; in others, to unborn generations of men.  No one will ever know that I was the cause, but it will be none the less true, for all that.  Among you boys you have a game:  you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push a brick, it knocks its neighbor