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THE MEMOIRS OF A CAT
beings may read such stories with benefit to themselves. Presumably, this statement would be hotly disputed by human vanity. But that vanity should be tempered by the knowledge of the very insignificant place man occupies in the grand scheme of the Universe. When man knows that he is a tiny bit of carbon crawling on a speck of cosmic dust, he should be ashamed of his vanity.
Heliocentric astronomy, revived by Copernicus, dealt the first blow to human vanity. Modern astral physics has degraded the entire solar system to the insignificance of a "freak ". If man were the special creation of God, or the finite form of the Infinite (as the Vedantist would prefer to say), why is he placed in such a humiliating position? The physical Universe, with myriads of stars of which our sun is a very ordinary one, and thousands of millions of star-galaxies, is not a gigantic stage set for man to strut about. The phenomenon of life, particularly in the form of human ego-centrism, is not the cream of the cosmic scheme. It is rather a blemish in the magnificent harmony of things. I am a part of this blemish, just as much as is Rabindranath Tagore or Edgar Wallace. Indeed, the discredit belongs equally to every bit of crawling protoplasm.
All forms of higher life-man, monkey, horse, dog, cat, bat, to name only a few-grow each out of an egg which is absolutely uniform in all cases. The one of my origin was a tiny lump of
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