But your pastoral Arab scorns a knowledge of general mundane
principles. His life is a series of disconnected happenings which must be
enjoyed or endured; he is incapable of reading aright the past or present,
because he asks himself _why?_ instead of _how?_ Whoever despises the
investigation of secondary causes is a menace to his fellow-creatures.
Face to face with infinities, man disencumbers himself. Those abysmal
desert-silences, those spaces of scintillating rock and sand-dune over
which the eye roams and vainly seeks a point of repose, quicken his animal
perception; he stands alone and must think for himself--and so far good.
But while discarding much that seems inconsiderable before such wide and
splendid horizons, this nomad loads himself with the incubus of
dream-states; while standing alone, he grows into a ferocious brigand.
Poets call him romantic, but politicians are puzzled what to do with a
being who to a senile mysticism joins the peevish destructiveness of a
child.
It is an almost universal fallacy to blame the desert for this state of
affairs; to insinuate, for example, that even as it disintegrates the
mountains into sand, so it decomposes the intellectual fabric of mankind,
his synthesizing faculty, into its primordial elements of ecstasy and
emotionalism.
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