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Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilisation surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby the whole image in distortion. We patronise them for their tragic fate of having taken a form so below ourselves. And there in we err and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world more complex than ours they move more finished and complete, gifted with extensions of senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
Henry Beston.
The Outermost House.1928. |
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