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      The Force that works by the light of Ignorance,

      Her animal experiment began,

      Crowding with conscious creatures her world-scheme;

      But to the outward only were they alive,

      Only they replied to touches and surfaces

      And to the prick of need that drove their lives.

      A body that knew not its own soul within,

      There lived and longed, had wrath and joy and grief;

      A mind was there that met the objective world

      As if a stranger or enemy at its door:

      Its thoughts were kneaded by the shocks of sense;

      It captured not the spirit in the form,

      It entered not the heart of what it saw;

      It looked not for the power behind the act,

      It studied not the hidden motive in things

      Nor strove to find the meaning of it all.

      Beings were there who wore a human form;

      Absorbed they lived in the passion of the scene,

      But knew not who they were or why they lived:

      Content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act,

      Life had for them no aim save Nature’s joy

      And the stimulus and delight of outer things;

      Identified with the spirit’s outward shell,

      They worked for the body’s wants, they craved no more.

      The veiled spectator watching from their depths

      Fixed not his inward eye upon himself

      Nor turned to find the author of the plot,

      He saw the drama only and the stage.

      There was no brooding stress of deeper sense,

      The burden of reflection was not borne:

      Mind looked on Nature with unknowing eyes,

      Adored her boons and feared her monstrous strokes.

      It pondered not on the magic of her laws,

      It thirsted not for the secret wells of Truth,

      But made a register of crowding facts

      And strung sensations on a vivid thread:

      It hunted and it fled and sniffed the winds,

      Or slothed inert in sunshine and soft air:

      It sought the engrossing contacts of the world,

      But only to feed the surface sense with bliss.

      These felt life’s quiver in the outward touch,

      They could not feel behind the touch the soul.

      To guard their form of self from Nature’s harm,

      To enjoy and to survive was all their care.

      The narrow horizon of their days was filled

      With things and creatures that could help and hurt:

      The world’s values hung upon their little self.

      Isolated, cramped in the vast unknown,

      To save their small lives from surrounding Death

      They made a tiny circle of defence

      Against the siege of the huge universe:

      They preyed upon the world and were its prey,

      But never dreamed to conquer and be free.

      Obeying the World-Power’s hints and firm taboos

      A scanty part they drew from her rich store;

      There was no conscious code and no life-plan:

      The patterns of thinking of a little group

      Fixed a traditional behaviour’s law.

      Ignorant of soul save as a wraith within,

      Tied to a mechanism of unchanging lives

      And to a dull usual sense and feeling’s beat,

      They turned in grooves of animal desire.

      In walls of stone fenced round they worked and warred,

      Did by a banded selfishness a small good

      Or wrought a dreadful wrong and cruel pain

      On sentient lives and thought they did no ill.

      Ardent from the sack of happy peaceful homes

      And gorged with slaughter, plunder, rape and fire,

      They made of human selves their helpless prey,

      A drove of captives led to lifelong woe,

      Or torture a spectacle made and holiday,

      Mocking or thrilled by their torn victims’ pangs;

      Admiring themselves as titans and as gods

      Proudly they sang their high and glorious deeds

      And praised their victory and their splendid force.

      An animal in the instinctive herd

      Pushed by life impulses, forced by common needs,

      Each in his own kind saw his ego’s glass;

      All served the aim and action of the pack.

      Those like himself, by blood or custom kin,

      To him were parts of his life, his adjunct selves,

      His personal nebula’s constituent stars,

      Satellite companions of his solar I.

      A master of his life’s environment,

      A leader of a huddled human mass

      Herding for safety on a dangerous earth,

      He gathered them round him as if minor Powers

      To make a common front against the world,

      Or, weak and sole on an indifferent earth,

      As a fortress for his undefended heart,

      Or else to heal his body’s loneliness.

      In others than his kind he sensed a foe,

      An alien unlike force to shun and fear,

      A stranger and adversary to hate and slay.

      Or he lived as lives the solitary brute;

      At war with all he bore his single fate.

      Absorbed in the present act, the fleeting days,

      None thought to look beyond the hour’s gains,

      Or dreamed to make this earth a fairer world,

      Or felt some touch divine surprise his heart.

      The gladness that the fugitive moment gave,

      The desire grasped, the bliss, the experience won,

      Movement and speed and strength were joy enough

      And bodily longings shared and quarrel and play,

      And tears and laughter and the need called love.

      In war and clasp these life-wants joined the All-Life,

      Wrestlings of a divided unity

      Inflicting mutual grief and happiness

      In ignorance of the Self for ever one.

      Arming

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