"The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more
complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with
extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices
we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings;
they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and
time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of
animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated
artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of
his knowledge, and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image
in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their
tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we
err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a
world older and more complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we
have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They
are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations,
caught with ourselves in the net of time, fellow prisoners of the
splendor and travail of the earth.
-From "The Outermost House"
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