B199 <=> B201 [BTG XIX Beelzebub’s second descent, p. 200]

“’It will run after you and cut every sort of caper before you just to please you all the more.

“’You can be familiar with it, you can beat it, you can hurt it; it will never turn on you, but will always humiliate itself still more before you.

“’But try the same on your cat.

“’What do you think? Will it respond to your indignities as your dog did, and cut the same humble capers for your amusement? Of course not. . .

“’Even if the cat is not strong enough to retaliate immediately, it will remember this attitude of yours toward it for a long time, and at some time or other will get its revenge.

“’For instance, it is said that it has often happened that a cat has bitten the throat of a man while he was asleep. I can quite believe it, knowing what may have been the cat’s reasons for it.

“’No, the cat will stand up for itself, it knows its own value, it is proud, and this is merely because it is a cat and its nature is on that gradation of Reason where according to the merits of its ancestors it just should be.

“’In any case, no being, and no man, should be angry with a cat for this.

“’Is it its fault that it is a cat and that owing to the merits of its ancestors, its presence occupies such a gradation of “consciousness-of-self?”

“’It must neither be despised for this, nor beaten, nor ill-treated; on the contrary, one must give it its due, as one occupying a higher rung on the ladder of the evolution of “consciousness-of-self.”’

“By the way, my dear boy, concerning the reciprocal relations of beings, a former famous prophet from the planet ‘Desagroanskrad,’ the great ‘Arhoonilo,’ now already the assistant to the chief investigator of the whole Universe in respect of the details of Objective Morality, once said: