As a rule, chroniclers become extremely honest when they feel that what they have to say about themselves is of monumental importance. I, on the contrary, with the premise of honesty arrive at the complete immaterialness of my person; that is, I am forced into an insufferable garrulity simply because I lack the ability to tell where the statistical caprice of personality composition leaves off and the rule of the behavior of the species begins.

In various fields one can acquire knowledge that is real, or the kind only that provides spiritual comfort, and the two need not agree. The differentiation of these two types of knowledge in anthropology borders on the impossible. If we know nothing so well as ourselves, it is surely for this reason: that we constantly renew our demand for nonexistent knowledge, i.e., information as to what created man, while ruling out in advance, without realizing it, the possibility of the union of pure accident with the most profound necessity.

I once wrote a program for an experiment of one of my friends. The idea was to simulate, in a computer, families of neutral beings; they would be homeostats, cognizant of their “environment” but possessing, initially, no “emotional” or “ethical” qualities. These beings multiplied — only in the machine, of course, therefore in a way that a layman would call “arithmetically” — and after a few dozen “generations” there continually appeared, over and over again, in each of the “specimens,” a characteristic that made no sense at all to us, a sort of equivalent of “aggression.” After many painstaking but fruitless checking calculations, my friend, at his wit’s end — really grasping at straws — began examining the most trivial circumstances of the experiment; and then it turned out that a certain relay had reacted to the changes of humidity in the air, and thus those changes had become the hidden producer of the deviation.