Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/298

262 —In the outbursts of passion, and the will fancies of clean and insanity, man recovers his own pre-history and that of humanity: the animal world with its savage grimaces. His memory, for once, reflects on the past; while his civilised state evolves from the oblivion of these primitive experiences, hence, from the failing of that memory. Whoever, as one exceedingly forgetful, has always kept aloof from all this, does not understand mankind, yet it is in the interest of all, now and then, to meet some such individuals who “do not understand them," and who are, as it were, procreated from divine seed and born of reason. —The friend whose hopes we cannot satisfy, we would prefer to have for an enemy. —In the midst of the ocean of genesis we adventurers and birds of passage wake up on an islet not larger than a canoe, and here glance around for a short while as furtively and as curiously as possible; for how quickly may some wind blow us away or some wave sweep over the islet and nothing be left of us! But here, on this small space,