He could get no assistance from them, because they only told him that he would be happier if he acted always as a rational being, and this did not help him.

They told him, also, in what seemed a burst of unanimity, that human nature would be better and happier if it were not human nature, but something else.

Some of the writers believed that this result might be attained by making many laws and some of them were of the opinion that the way to it was to undo a majority of the laws that were already made.

All admitted that the world was very badly off and that something must be done, and done very quickly, to relieve it--but the trouble was that each writer's remedy was different from every other writer's, and yet each writer's was the imperative, the essential one.
There was a single point on which they agreed, and that was that human nature would be better and happier if it were different.

But poor human nature, having known this ever since it left the tree-tops, went on, just the same, being all the time the thing that it was obliged to be.
"There's no help for me here," said Abel, and moving away from the shelf, he leaned his arms in the window, and looked out on the dripping wheel and the crooked sycamore, which was decorated with little round greenish balls of flowers.