THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



68 



are real because they began to be so as soon as there was 

 anything in the universe vs^hich could defy law^ and habit 

 by risking something v^hich had never been done before. 



Fev^ of us are so committed to a merely mechanical 

 behaviorism that we would refuse to call brave and ad- 

 venturous the first human pioneers who came to live in 

 the American West. So in their own way were the plants 

 and animals who had preceded them there. And so, a 

 fortiori, were those far back in time who first dared learn 

 how to adapt themselves to that desert which all dry land 

 then was. If daring to do what our intelligence recognizes 

 as dangerous constitutes "courage," then the animal who 

 similarly rejects the imperatives of its instinct is exhibiting 

 a virtue at least analogous, and so, in some still dimmer 

 fashion, is the simplest creature, animal or even vegetable, 

 which refuses to obey its long established reflexes. The 

 whole course of evolution is directed by just such cou- 

 rageous acts. It must have its countless unremembered 

 heroes who created diversity by daring to do what no 

 member of its species had ever done before. 



Most scientists, I am well aware, would object strenu- 

 ously to any such line of reasoning.. But then many scien- 

 tists are firmly convinced that in man himself there is 

 also no such thing as either daring or courage as dis- 

 tinguished from a reflex, congenital or conditioned. 'And 

 perhaps that conclusion is inevitable if you begin by deny- 

 ing their reality to all creatures "lower" than man. If every 

 other animal is a machine then why shouldn't human 

 beings be machines also. And if to speak of the "courage" 

 of some very lowly creature is to indulge in exaggeration, 

 it is at least an exaggeration opposite and corrective to 

 a more usual one. 



