Man is perhaps not the center, the focus of the universe. One may go so far as to believe that there exists above him, on the animal level, beings whose behavior is as alien to him as his own must be to the mayfly or the whale. There is nothing that would necessarily prevent such beings from completely escaping his sensory frame of reference, since these beings might avail themselves of a type of camouflage which, no matter how one imagines it, becomes plausible when one considers the theory of form and what has been discovered about mimetic animals. This idea surely affords a wide field of speculation, though it tends to reduce man, as an interpreter of the universe, to a condition as modest as the child conceives the ants to be in when he has overturned the anthill with his foot. Considering perturbations like the cyclone, in the face of which man is powerless to be anything but victim or witness, or like war (on the subject of which notoriously inadequate views have been advanced), it would not be impossible, in the course of a vast work, which would be constantly presided over by the boldest kind of induction, to succeed in making plausible the complexion and structure of such hypothetical beings which obscurely manifest themselves to us in fear and the feeling of chance. I should like to point out that I do not here perceptively depart from the statement of Novalis: "In reality, we live inside an animal on which we are parasites. The constitution of this animal determines our own and vice versa." I am merely asking with William James: "who knows whether, in nature, we do not hold as small a place besides beings whose existence we do not suspect, as our cats and dogs living in our houses at our sides?"" Scientists themselves do not entirely oppose this view: ""round us, perhaps, circulate beings who are built on the same plan as ourselves, but different from men, for example, beings whose albumins are straight." Thus spoke Emile Duclaux(1840-1904), onetime director of the Pasteur Institute. A new myth? These beings, must they be convinced that they derive from a mirage, or should they be given an opportunity to reveal themselves?
Andre Breton
Surrealism