This Simian World | Page 7

long memories, loyalty; they
are steady and sure; and not narrow, not self-absorbed, for they seem
interested in everything. What was it then, that put them out of the
race?
Could it have been a quite natural belief that they had already won?
And when they saw that they hadn't, and that the monkey-men were
getting ahead, were they too great-minded and decent to exterminate
their puny rivals?
It may have been their tolerance and patience that betrayed them. They

wait too long before they resent an imposition or insult. Just as ants are
too energetic and cats too shrewd for their own highest good, so the
elephants suffer from too much patience. Their exhibitions of it may
seem superb,--such power and such restraint, combined, are noble,--but
a quality carried to excess defeats itself. Kings who won't lift their
scepters must yield in the end; and, the worst of it is, to upstarts who
snatch at their crowns.
I fancy the elephants would have been gentler masters than we: more
live-and-let-live in allowing other species to stay here. Our way is to
kill good and bad, male and female and babies, till the few last
survivors lie hidden away from our guns. All species must surrender
unconditionally--those are our terms--and come and live in barns
alongside us; or on us, as parasites. The creatures that want to live a life
of their own, we call wild. If wild, then no matter how harmless we
treat them as outlaws, and those of us who are specially well brought
up shoot them for fun. Some might be our friends. We don't wish it. We
keep them all terrorized. When one of us conquering monkey-men
enters the woods, most animals that scent him slink away, or race off in
a panic. It is not that we have planned this deliberately: but they know
what we're like. Race by race they have been slaughtered. Soon all will
be gone. We give neither freedom nor life-room to those we defeat.
If we had been as strong as the elephants, we might have been kinder.
When great power comes naturally to people, it is used more urbanely.
We use it as parvenus do, because that's what we are. The elephant,
being born to it, is easy-going, confident, tolerant. He would have been
a more humane king.
A race descended from elephants would have had to build on a large
scale. Imagine a crowd of huge, wrinkled, slow-moving elephant-men
getting into a vast elephant omnibus.
And would they have ever tried airships?
The elephant is stupid when it comes to learning how to use tools. So
are all other species except our own. Isn't it strange? A tool, in the most
primitive sense, is any object, lying around, that can obviously be used
as an instrument for this or that purpose. Many creatures use objects as
/materials/, as birds use twigs for nests. But the step that no animal
takes is learning freely to use things as instruments. When an elephant
plucks off a branch and swishes his flanks, and thus keeps away insects,

he is using a tool. But he does it only by a vague and haphazard
association of ideas. If he once became a conscious user of tools he
would of course go much further.
We ourselves, who are so good at it now, were slow enough in
beginning. Think of the long epochs that passed before it entered our
heads.
And all that while the contest for leadership blindly went on, without
any species making use of this obvious aid. The lesson to be learned
was simple: the reward was the rule of a planet. Yet only one species,
our own, has ever had that much brains.
It makes you wonder what other obvious lessons may still be
unlearned.
It is not necessarily stupid however, to fail to use tools. To use tools
involves using reason, instead of sticking to instinct. Now, sticking to
instinct has its disadvantages, but so has using reason. Whichever
faculty you use, the other atrophies, and partly deserts you. We are
trying to use both. But we still don't know which has the more value.
A sudden vision comes to me of one of the first far-away ape-men who
tried to use reason instead of instinct as a guide for his conduct. I
imagine him, perched in his tree, torn between those two voices,
wailing loudly at night by a river, in his puzzled distress.
My poor far-off brother!

VIII
We have been considering which species was on the whole most finely
equipped to be rulers, and thereafter achieve a high civilization; but that
wasn't the problem. The real problem was which would /do/ it:--a
different matter.
To do it there was need of a species that had at