Dalen considered these things, and he knew what billions of years of inactivity could do to a god’s mind. Even now he felt the lightly restraining touch of Lennat’s thought-force, a little dulled by long disuse. He felt grateful for Lennat’s interest, and yet he had an idea that was more than just that⁠—it was an ideal.

Dalen wanted to see a species evolve that could temper intelligence with sentiment.

Dalen’s belief was that intelligence alone, even the unusually high forms developed by certain Arachnids and some Centipods, was not the most pleasing form of life. He believed that sentiment⁠—even though unsupported in logic⁠—had a definite place in the cosmic aim of finally conjunctive symbiosis, because it provided the most comfortable form of relationship, and there no longer was any argument even among the gods that comfort was the Ultimate Aim.

So Dalen wished to give such an entity an opportunity to evolve. He knew there would be definite limitations. For one thing, there could be only two forms: avian or mammalian.

The birds and the mammals were the only two forms that developed a great deal of conjunctive feeling, and so his choice was necessarily limited to them. He preferred avian for its ability to leave a solid surface, but he liked mammalian for its inevitable eagerness to develop an opposed thumb. And the opposed thumb, Dalen believed, was the quickest answer to any sort of technical progress.

Some of the gods held that technical progress was undesirable, that any form of life would more quickly evolve into the abstract forms such as pure energy, thought-force, and so on, if they should lack technical ability. But Dalen saw desirable things in technics, as he saw desirable things in sentiment, and he had been determined for several ages that he would some day put his theory into effect.