
“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 creatures 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 than ours they move finished and
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 life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the
earth.”
~ from “The Outermost"