as hunger sharpens. You begin to think. Mentally you recall all the places you have ever heard others speak of as abounding in food. Your sharpening hunger impels you to an entirely new kind of effort—for you. You go prowling about in search of places you have heard others speak of. Your hunger is now impelling you to follow race habits of thought.
But you still fail to find food. Your hunger grows sharper and sharper and your wits follow suit. YOU try everything you ever heard of and still no food, There is famine in the land. You have exhausted your personal resources and the race resources, and still hunger grows and urges you.
Then at last you begin really to think. Your wits go feeling out beyond all the realms you ever heard of before, or they go roaming with a new intelligence and questioning over the same old ground. Sticks and stones and all sorts of things nobody ever dreamed of eating are now with new eves examined and tested, and by and by you discover food and satisfaction where nobody ever before dreamed of finding it. At last hunger has made you think—it has made you in this particular thing wiser than the whole race. It has differentiated you from the rest of your kind. It has impelled you to a little higher mark of intelligence than has even before been reached.
Now the rest of your race gazes at you and calls you “so original, you know.” And it straightway adopts your new food and is differentiated as you are.
This is the way desire has created the world as it is, and this is the way desire is every moment changing it.
We evolve by the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom.
Desire impels us to the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom.
Can you see why a too prosperous nation or individual begins immediately to degenerate? All his hungers being readily gratified his wits arc dulled and he ceases to gain intelligence. Soon the sameness of that in which he lives grows irksome and he loses his desire to live. Disintegration sets in. He is tired ot the same old thing, even though that thing is beautiful and comfortable.
When a nation or a man gets into this state of satisfied stupor
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