148 PURIFICATION. 
on my window-shutters, in a very narrow street, at the entrance of a 
noisy bazaar, and at the busiest moment of the year, a little before 
the Ramadan, when the ceremonies of marriage fill the city day and 
night with uproar and tumult. The level roofs of the houses, the 
usual promenade of the prisoners of the harem and their slaves, are 
in like manner haunted by a crowd of birds. The eagles sleep in 
confidence on the balconies of the minarets.” 
Conquerors have never failed to turn into derision this gentleness, 
this tenderness for animated nature. The Persians, the Romans in 
Egypt, our Europeans in India, the French in Algeria, have often 
outraged and stricken these innocent brothers of man, the object of his 
ancient reverence. ‘A Cambyses slew the sacred cow; a Roman the 
ibis or cat which destroyed unclean reptiles. But what means the 
cow? The fecundity of the country. And the ibis? Its salubrity. 
Destroy these animals, and the country is no longer habitable. That 
which has saved India and Egypt through so many misfortunes, and 
preserved their fertility, is neither the Nile nor the Ganges; it is 
respect for animal life, the mildness and the gentle heart of man. 
Profound in meaning was the speech of the priest of Sais to the 
Greek Herodotus: ‘You shall be children ever.” 
We shall always be so—we, men of the West—subtle and graceful 
reasoners, so long as we shall not have comprehended, with a simple 
and more exhaustive view, the reason of things. To be a child is to 
seize life only by partial glimpses. To be a man is to be fully con- 
scious of all its harmonious unity. The child disports himself, shatters, 
and spurns; he finds his happiness in undoing. And science in its 
childhood does the same ; it cannot study unless it kills; the sole use 
which it makes of a living miracle is, in the first place, to dissect it. 
None of us carry into our scientific pursuits that tender reverence for 
life which nature rewards by unveiling to us her mysteries. 
Enter the catacombs, where, to employ our haughty language, the 
rude monuments sleep of a barbarous superstition ; visit the treasure- 
stores of India and Egypt; at each step you meet with naive but not 
the less profound intuitions of the essential mystery of life and death. 
