The Beginnings of Perspectives Promising Nothing Very Cheerful

“They also differ among themselves in the color of their skin and in the conformation of their hair, and these latter particularities are determined in their presences, just as they are everywhere else, by the effects of that part of the planetary surface where the given beings arise and where they are formed until they reach the age of responsible beings, or as they say, until they become ‘adult.’

“As regards their general ‘psyche’ itself and its fundamental traits, no matter upon what part of the surface of their planet they arise, these traits in all of them have precisely the same particularities, among them being also that property of the three-brained beings there, thanks to which on that strange planet alone in the whole of the Universe does that horrible process occur among three-brained beings which is called the ‘process of the destruction of each other’s existence,’ or, as it is called on that ill-fated planet, ‘war.’

“Besides this chief particularity of their common psyche, there are completely crystallized in them and there unfailingly become a part of their common presences—regardless of where they may arise and exist—functions which exist under the names ‘egoism,’ ‘self-love,’ ‘vanity,’ ‘pride,’ ‘self-conceit,’ ‘credulity,’ ‘suggestibility,’ and many other properties quite abnormal and quite unbecoming to the essence of any three-brained beings whatsoever.

“Of these abnormal being-particularities, the particularity of their psyche the most terrible for them personally is that which is called ‘suggestibility.’

“About this extremely strange and singular psychic particularity I shall specially explain to you sometime.”

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