142 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP 



carnal observe with what uniformity almost every 

 function in both savage and civilised life gravitates 

 toward eating and drinking. If it is a picnic, 

 a convention, a national holiday, a Christmas 

 celebration, a meeting of a fraternal society, a 

 thanksgiving ceremony, or what not, eating is one 

 of the main things, and the one exercise into 

 which four-fifths of those present probably enter 

 with the greatest enthusiasm. 



The human soul is the blossom, not the 

 beginning, of psychic evolution. Mother -love 

 compassionated infancy long before a babe came 

 from the stricken loins of woman. The inhabitants 

 of the earth had been seeking pleasure and seeking 

 to avoid pain, and seeking ever with the same sad 

 futility, long before man with his retinue of puny 

 philosophies strutted upon the scene. Hate 

 poisoned the cisterns of the sea and dropped its 

 pollutions through the steaming spaces ages before 

 there was malice among men. Altruism is older 

 than the mountains, and selfishness hardened the 

 living heart before the continents were lifted. 

 There was wonder in the woods and in the wild 

 heart of the fastnesses before there were wailings 

 in synagogues and genuflections about altar piles. 

 The frogs, crickets, and birds had been singing love 

 a thousand generations and more when the first 

 amoroso knelt in dulcet descant to a beribboned 

 Venus. Human nature is not an article of divine 

 manufacture, any more than is the human form. 

 It came out of the breast of the bird, out of the 

 soul of the quadruped. The human heart does 



