Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 36))

enable us to grasp what it is that intelligence fails to give us, and indicate the
means of supplementing it. On the one hand, it will utilize the mechanism
of intelligence itself to show how intellectual molds cease to be strictly ap-
plicable; and on the other hand, by its own work, it will suggest to us the
vague feeling, if nothing more, of what must take the place of intellectual
molds. Thus, intuition may bring the intellect to recognize that life does
not quite go into the category of the many nor yet into that of the one; that
neither mechanical causality nor finality can give a sufficient interpretation
of the vital process. Then, by the sympathetic communication which it
establishes between us and the rest of the living, by the expansion of our con-
sciousness which it brings about, it introduces us into life’s own domain,
which is reciprocal interpenetration, endlessly continued creation. But,
though it thereby transcends intelligence, it is from intelligence that has come
the push that has made it rise to the point it has reached. Without intelli-
gence, it would have remained in the form of instinct, riveted to the special
object of its practical interest, and turned outward by it into movements of
locomotion.”

THE LIBERATOR—A FABLE

ONCE upon a time there was an ass. He was a very peculiar ass; for
he had an idee fixe. He was a frog and, instead of “Haw-he, he
haw” he brayed nothing but “Quock, quock.”
The most distinguished among the learned asses cudgelled their wits in
vain over their co-ass—“this psycopathic phenomenon in the stream of con-
sciousness.” Everybody bewailed his mental derangement. For he was still
young, and seemed, otherwise, a most promising ass. Yet exhort or humor
him as they would, they could get no answer from him but a haughty “Quock,
quock.”
So in a little while he grew from an object of pity into the stock butt of
asinine humor. For, by this time, he had become exceedingly proud of his art
of quockery, and as blown up with conceit as a college president.
The older generation of asses vanished, and their descendants inherited
the day and spirit of the day. But still the psycopathic ass continued to sing
“Quock, quock.”
Then Thistle-tide came along—the time when all Asininia was wont to
hold its great singing contest, and the foremost asses of all lands flocked to
that Olympia. Its heralding was heard in every nook and cranny of the world,
even unto the confines of Asininia; and admission to the arena cost an incred-
ible number of thistle-heads.
Now the rumor spread like wildfire that the quock-ass had announced
himself as a contestant. “Haw-he-yaws”! But it caused a sensation!
The mouths of some watered with a foretaste of the treat, others were
almost apoplectic with indignation at the quocker’s presumption. But from
now on his name was on every ass’s tongue.