Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/184

 they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest

And always the puppets moved toward greater efficiency and comeliness. The puppet-shifter appeared to seek at once utility and artistic self-expression. So the protoplasm—that first imperceptible pinhead of living matter—had become a fish; the fish had become a batrachian, the batrachian a reptile, the reptile a mammal; thus had the puppets continuously been reshaped, into more elaborate forms more captivating to the eye, until amiable and shatter-pated man stood erect in the world. And man, in turn, had climbed a long way from gorillaship, however far he was as yet from godhead—blindly moving always, like fish and reptile, toward unapprehended loftier goals.

But, just as men's lives came to seem to Kennaston like many infinitesimal threads woven into the pattern of human destiny, so Kennaston grew to suspect that the existence of mankind upon earth was but an incident in the unending struggle of life to find a home in the universe. Human