THE QUESTION OF ABERRATIONS

[1]Bienenzeitung (Gazette des Abeilles) janvier, 1850.

[2]E. Rambert, after A. Forel, les Mœurs des fourmis (Bibliothèque universelle, tome LV).

Two sorts of sexual aberration.—Sexual aberrations of animals.—Those of men.—Crossing of species.—Chastity.—Modesty.—Varieties and localizations of sexual bashfulness.—Artificial creation of modesty.—Sort of modesty natural to all females.—Cruelty.—Picture of carnage.—The cricket eaten alive.—Habits of carabes.—Every living creature is a prey.—Necessity to kill or to be killed.

Sexual aberrations are of two sorts. The cause of the error is internal, or external. The flower of the arum muscivorum (fly-catching arum) by its cadaverous odour attracts flies in search of rotting flesh in which to lay their eggs. Schopenhauer has supported by this, or analogous, fact a theory just, but somewhat summary, of aberration from external cause. Aberration from internal cause is sometimes explained by the statement that the same arteries irrigate and the same nerves animate the region of the sacrum, anterior and posterior; the excretal canals being always near each other, and sometimes common, at least for part of their length. One has spoken seriously of the drake's sodomy, but anatomy refuses to understand it. Whether a drake frequents another drake or a duck, he addresses himself in both cases to the single door of a vestibule into which all excretions are poured. Doubtless the drake is aberrated, and his accomplice still more so, but nature deserves part of the blame. In general, animal aberrations require very simple explanations. There is a keen desire, and very urgent need, which if unsatisfied produces an inquietude, which may augment until a sort of momentary madness takes hold of the animal, and throws it blindly upon all sorts of illusions. This may go, doubtless, to the point of hallucination. There is also a need, purely muscular, of at least sketching in the sexual act, either passive or active; one sees, by singular inversion, cows in heat mounting each other, perhaps with the idea of exciting the male, or perhaps the visual representation which they make themselves of the desired act, forces them to try an imitation: it is a marvellous example, because it is absurd, of the motor force of images.

There are two parts in the sexual act; that of the specie, and that of the individual; but that of the specie is only given it by means of the individual. In relation to the male in rut, it is a question of a very simple natural need. He must empty his spermatic canals: lacking females they say the stag rubs his prong on trees to provoke ejaculation. Bitches in heat rub their vulva on the ground. Such are the rudiments of onanism, suddenly carried by primates to such a high degree of perfection. One has seen male cantharides, themselves ridden, riding other males; the argule, a small crustacean parasite of fresh-water fish, is so ardent that he often addresses himself to other males, or to gravid or even dead females. From the microscopic beasts to man, aberration is everywhere; but one should, rather, call it, at least among animals, impatience. Animals are by no means mere machines, they, as well as men, are capable of imaginations, they dream, they have illusions, they are subject to desires whose source is in the interior movement of their organism. The sight or odour of a female over-excites the male; but far from any female, the logic of the vital movement suffices perfectly to put them in a state of rut; it is absolutely the same with females. If the state of rut, and if the sensibilization of the genital parts is established far from necessary sex, we have here a natural cause of aberration, for it is this special sensibility which must be used: the first simulacrum, or even the first propitious obstacle will be the adversary against which the exasperated animal exercises the energy by which he is tormented.

One may apply the general principles of this psychology to man, but on condition that we do not forget that man's genital sensibility is apt to be awakened at any moment, and that for him the causes of aberration are multiplied ad infinitum. There would be extremely few aberrated men and women if moral customs permitted a quite simple satisfaction of sexual needs, if it were possible for the two sexes to meet always at the opportune moment. There would remain aberrations of anatomical order; they would be less frequent and less tyrannic, if our customs, instead of contriving ways to make sexual relations very difficult, should favour them. But this easiness is only possible, in promiscuity, which is possibly a worse ill than aberration. Thus all questions are insoluble, and one can only improve nature by disorganizing her. Human order is often a disorder worse than spontaneous disorder, because it is a forced and premature finality, an inopportune turning of the vital river out of its course.

Sexual selection is probably not a source of variation (i. e., of type); its rôle is, on the contrary, to keep the specie in statu quo. The causes of variation are probably changes of climate, the nature of the soil, the general milieu, and also disease, the troubles of blood and nerve circulation—perhaps certain sexual aberrations. I say, "perhaps," for the cross-breeding between individuals of different species, living in liberty, seems difficult, as soon as the species is really something different from a variety in evolution, a form still seeking itself. At that stage anything is possible; but one is speaking of species (i.e., set species). Mules, bardots, leporides are artificial products; one has never found them in free nature. It is very difficult to obtain the copulation of a hare and she-rabbit; the she-rabbit is refractory and the hare lacking enthusiasm. The mare very often refuses the ass; if she turns her head at the moment of his mounting, one has to bandage her eyes to overcome her disgust; it is the same with the she-ass whom one offers a stallion for producing the bardot. As for the product of bull and mare, the celebrated jumart is a chimæra: comparison of the meagre prong of the bull to the massive one of the stallion is enough to convince one that such dissimilar instruments can not replace each other. Nevertheless it would be imprudent wholly to rule out this form of sexual aberration from the causes of variability of species. That is perhaps one of its justifications.

Of all sexual aberrations perhaps the most curious is chastity. Not that it is anti-natural, nothing is anti-natural, but because of the pretexts it obeys. Bees, ants, termites, present examples of perfect chastity, but of chastity that is utilized, social chastity. Involuntary, congenital, the neuter state among insects is a state de facto, equivalent to the sexual state, and the origin of a characterized activity. In humans it is a state, often only apparent or transitory, obtained voluntarily or demanded by necessity, a precarious condition, so difficult to maintain that people have heaped up about it all sorts of moral and religious walls, and even real walls made of stones and mortar. Permanent and voluntary chastity is nearly always a religious practice. Men, in all ages, have been persuaded that perfection of being was only obtainable by such renunciation. This seems absurd; it is, on the contrary, very direct logic. The only means of not being an animal is to abstain from the act to which all animals without exception deliver themselves. It is the same motive that has made people imagine abstinence, fasting; but as one can not live without eating, and as one can live without making love, this second method of perfectionment has remained in the state of outline.

It is true, asceticism, of which humanity alone is capable, is one of the means which may lift us above animality; but by itself it is insufficient to do this; by itself it is good for nothing, save perhaps to excite sterile pride; one must add to it an active exercise of the intelligence. It remains to know whether asceticism, which deprives the sensibility of one of its healthiest and most stimulating nutriments is favourable to the exercise of the intelligence. As it is not the least necessary to answer this question here, we will say nothing save this, provisorily: one need not scorn chastity nor disdain asceticism.

Is modesty an aberration? Indulgent observers have believed that they noticed it in elephants as well as in rabbits. The modesty of the elephant is a popular maxim which makes right-minded women cast sheep's eyes, in circuses, at the great beast who hides for her amours. During copulation, says a celebrated rabbit-raiser[1]"the male and female should be alone, in demi-obscurity. This solitude and obscurity are more necessary in view of the fact that certain females show signs of modesty." The modesty of animals is a fancy. Like modesty among humans, it is merely the mask of fear, the crystallization of timorous habits, necessitated by the animals being unarmed during coupling. This is very well known and needs no explanation. But the need of reproduction is so tyrannic that, even among the most timid animals, it does not always leave them presence of mind enough to hide themselves during the amour. The most domesticated of animals, one knows it only too well, shows at this moment neither fear nor shame.

In man, among the civilized and among the uncivilized, sexual fear, shame, has taken a thousand forms which, for the most part, seem to have no longer any relation to the original feeling whence they are derived. One notices however that if the milieu where the couple finds itself is such that no attack, no ridicule is to be feared, shame vanishes, in part, or entirely, according to the degree of security, and the degree of excitement. For a crowd of populace on a fete night there is hardly any modesty save "legal modesty"; the example of one bolder couple is enough, if there is no authority to be feared, to set loose all the appetites, and one then sees clearly that man who does not hide in order to eat, only hides to make love under pressure of usage.

From the genital act, modesty is stretched over the exterior sexual organs by a mechanism very simple and very logical. But here, I think, one must distinguish between genital modesty bred from the custom of clothing the whole body, and that which has led men to cover only a particular part. Heat, cold, rain, insects explain clothing, but not the savage's cotton drawers or the fig leaf; especially when the leaf, imposed on married women, for example, is forbidden to virgins, or when this symbolic leaf is so reduced that it serves no purpose, save that of a sign. In this last case, it has not even any direct relation to genital modesty; it is only a matrimonial ornament, analogous to the ring or the collar, a sign, indeed indicating a condition. It is possible also, that among certain peoples where the men go entirely naked, the women wear an apron merely to keep off flies, gad-flies, rather as a peasant drapes his horse's muzzle with grass and leaves. Quite often, however, one is forced to recognize in these customs, the proof of a particular genital sensibility, analogous to civilized modesty. An English sailor, at the time of the first explorations got himself rejected by the Maori women not because he appeared without clothing, a state which custom required, but because he appeared with his organ unsheathed. This detail shocked them extremely. A curious example of the localization of shame: all parts of the body could and should show themselves, all save this small surface. On reflection, the modesty of Europeans at a ball or on the beach is almost as absurd as that of the Maoris, or as that of the fellaheen women who at the approach of a stranger remove their shirts, their sole garments, in order to cover their faces.

Sexual modesty, as one observes it today, among the most various peoples, is utterly artificial. Livingstone assures us that he developed modesty in little Kaffir girls by clothing them. Surprised in neglige, they covered their breasts—and this in a race where the women go wholly naked, save for a string round the middle, from which another string hangs. Clothing is only one of the causes of modesty, or of customs which give us the illusion of it, and the sentiment of fear associated with the sexual act does not explain all the rest. There is a shame particular to the female, an ensemble of movements, which one can assimilate to nothing, which one can attach to nothing. The gesture of Venus modest is not purely a woman's gesture; nearly all females, especially mammifers, have it; the female, who refuses, lowers her tail and clamps it between her legs; there is here, evidently, the origin of one of the particular forms of modesty. We have given characteristic examples in an earlier chapter.

Man is un-get-at-able; the slightest of his habitual sentiments has multiple and contradictory roots in a sensibility variable and always excessive. He is the least poised and the least reasonable of all animals, although the only one who has been able to construct for himself an idea of reason; he is an animal lunatic, that is to say one who flows out on all sides, who unravels everything in theory, and tangles up everything in fact, who desires and wills so many things, who throws his muscles into so many divers activities that his acts are at once the most sensible and the most absurd, the most conforming and the most opposed to the logical development of life. But he profits even by error, especially by the error fatal to all animals, and that constitutes his originality, as Pascal noted, and as Nietzsche repeats.

If the word modesty (pudeur) is not exact, when applied to animals, although one finds in their habits the distant origin of this complex and refined sentiment, the word cruelty, is not so either, when applied to their natural acts of defence or nutrition. Human cruelty is often an aberration; the cruelty of beasts is a necessity, a normal fact, often the very condition of their existence. An anarchist philosopher, ardent and naive disciple of Jean-Jacques believed that he traced an universal altruism in nature; he has redone with other words and another spirit, and a few new examples, the infantile works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and has abused, under pretext of inclining mankind to kindness, the right which one has to promenade about nature without seeing and without understanding her. Nature is neither good, nor evil, nor altruist, nor egoist; she is an ensemble of forces whereof none cedes save under superior pressure. Her conscience is that of a balance; being of a perfect indifference, it is of an absolute equity. But the sensibility of a balance is of a single order, single dimension; the sensibility of nature is infinite, to all actions and reactions. Whether the strong devour the weak, or the weak the strong, there is no compensation save in our human illusion; in reality one life is enlarged at the expense of another life, in one case as in the other, the total energy has been neither diminished nor augmented. There is neither strong, nor weak, there is a level which tends to remain constant. Our sentimentalism makes us see dramas where nothing occurs more disturbing than the general facts of nutrition. One may however look at these facts a little more closely, and then the parity of animal organism and the human organism will lead us to qualify as cruel, certain acts which would deserve this title if committed by man. One must say cruelty in order to understand it oneself; it is also necessary to remember that this cruelty is unconscious, that it is not felt by the devouring animal, that no element of ill-will enters into its act, and that man himself, the judge, in no way deprives himself of eating live creatures when they are better raw than cooked, living than dead.

A philanthe, sort of wasp, catches a bee to feed its larvæ; while carrying the prey to his nest, he presses the belly, sucks the bee, empties it of all its honey. But at the entrance of the nest a mantis is waiting, its double-saw of an arm is unfolded, the philanthe is nipped in passing. And one sees the mantis gnawing the belly of the philanthe while the philanthe continues sucking the bee's belly. And the mantis is so voracious that you can cut her in two without making her let go; a chain, truly, of carnage.

The larvæ of the sphex, another wasp, are fed on live crickets that have been paralyzed by a stab. As soon as it hatches the larva attacks the cricket in the belly at the chosen spot where the egg has been layed. The poor insect protests by feeble movements of antennæ, and mandibles: in vain; he is eaten alive, fibre by fibre, by a great worm which gnaws his entrails, and with so great a skill that it begins on the parts not essential to life, and thus keeps the prey fresh and tasty to the last. Such is the gentleness of nature, the good mother.

The carabes are fine coleoptera, violet, purple, and golden. They feed only on living prey, which they chew slowly, beginning at the belly, and boring slowly into the palpitating cavity. Helices, and slugs are thus tom apart by bands of carabes who dig them up and dissect them in a boiling of saliva.

Such are theft and murder, in nature. These are the normal acts. Herbivorous species alone are innocent perhaps from imbecility; always occupied in eating, because their food is so unsubstantial, they have not time to develop their powers: they are the inevitable prey, a sort of superior grass which will be browsed at the first opportunity. But the carnivora are in the same way eaten by their stronger and more adroit fellow-boarders. Very few beasts have a quiet death. The geotrupes, scarabs, necrophores their work finished, the egg-laying accomplished, devour each other to pass the time, perhaps, to lend a little gaiety to their last moments. Animals are of but two sorts, hunters and game, but there is scarcely a hunter who is not game in his turn. One does not find in nature the purely human invention of breeding for slaughter, or the more extraordinary one of breeding for hunting. Ants know how to milk their cows, the plant-lice, or their goats the staphylins; they do not know how to fatten them and to slit their gullets.

A hundred other signs of animal cruelty are scattered through this book. One may collect many others, and this might form a work edifying in this era of sentimentalism. Not because one wishes—quite the contrary—to offer them to men as so many examples; but because this might teach them that the first duty of a living being is to live, and that all life is nothing but a sum sufficient of murders. Men or tigers, sphex or carabes are under the same necessity: to kill or to die, or to shed blood or eat grass. But to eat grass, is not much better than suicide: ask the lambkins.

[1]Mariot-Didieux, Guide pratique de l'éducateur de lapins. Bibliothèque des professions industrielles et agricoles, série H. No. 17.

Instinct.—Can one oppose it to intelligence?—Instinct in man.—Primordiality of intelligence.—Instinct's conservative rôle.—Modifying rôle of intelligence.—Intelligence and consciousness.—Parity of animal and human instinct.—Mechanical character of the instinctive act.—Instinct modified by intelligence.—Habit of work creates useless work.—Objections to the identification of instinct and intelligence taken from life of insects.

The question of instinct is perhaps the most nerve-racking there is. Simple minds think they have solved it when they have set against this word the other word: intelligence. That is merely the elementary position of the problem. Not only does it explain nothing, but it opposes all explanations. If instinct and intelligence are not phenomena of the same order, reducible one to the other, the problem is insoluble and we will never know what instinct is, nor what is intelligence.

In the vulgar contrast one overhears the considerable naivete that animals have instinct and man, intelligence. This error, pure rhetoric, has prevented, up to the present, not the answer to the question which still seems a long way off, but the scientific exposure of the question itself. It includes but two formulæ: Either instinct is a fructification of intelligence; or intelligence is an augmentation of instinct. One must choose, and know that in choosing one makes, as the case may be, either instinct or intelligence, the seed or flower of a single plant: the sensibility.

One will first establish that for manifestations of instinct and for those of intelligence, there is no essential difference between man and animals. The life of all men, quite as well as that of all animals, is based on instinct, and doubtless there is no animal who can not give signs of spontaneity, that is to say, of intelligence. Instinct seems anterior because in all animals except man the quantity and especially the quality of instinctive facts greatly surpasses the value and number of intellectual facts. This is so, but in admitting this hierarchy, if one thereby explain with considerable difficulty, the formation of intelligence in man and in the animals which show more or less perceptible gleams of it, one also renounces by so doing, all later attempts that might furnish some notions as to the formation of instinct. If the bee makes his combs mechanically, if this act is as necessary as the evaporation of warmed water, or the crystallization of freezing water, it is useless to search any further: one is in the presence of a fact which will never yield anything else.

If, on the contrary, one consider intelligence as anterior, the field of investigation stretches out to infinity and instead of one problem radically insoluble, one has a hundred thousand or more, as many as there are animal species, and of these problems none is simple, none absurd. This manner of looking at it, brings, I admit, grave consequences. One must then look at matter as a simple allotropic form of intelligence, or, if you prefer, consider intelligence and matter as equivalents, and admit that intelligence is merely matter endowed with sensibility, and that its power of extremely diversifying itself finds impassable limits in the very forms which clothe it. Instinct is the proof of these limits. When acts have become instinctive, they have become invincible. A specie is a group of instincts whose tyranny becomes, one day, deaf to all attempts at movement. Evolution is limited by the resistance of what is, striving against what might be. There comes a moment when a specie is a mass too heavy to be moved by intelligence: then it remains in its place; this is death, but is compensated by the steady arrival of other species; new forms assumed by the inexhaustible Proteus.

One will add nothing, here, to this theory, save a few facts favourable to it, and a handful of objections.

The old distinction between intelligence and instinct, although false and superficial, may be adapted to the views just abbreviated. We will attribute to instinct the series of acts which tend to conserve the present condition of a specie; and to intelligence, those which tend to modify that condition. Instinct will be slavery, subjection to custom; intelligence will represent liberty, that is to say, choice, acts which while being necessary, since they occur, have yet been determined by an ensemble of causes anterior to those which govern instinct. Intelligence will be the deep, the reserve, the spring which after long digging emerges between the rocks. In everything that intelligence suggests, the consciousness of the species makes a departure; what is useful is incorporated in instinct, enlarging and diversifying it; what is useless perishes—or perhaps flowers in extravagances, as it does in man, in dancing and gardening birds, or the magpies attracted by a jewel, larks by a mirror! One will then call instinct, the series of useful aptitudes; intelligence, the series of aptitudes de luxe: but what is useful, what useless? Who will dare brand a series of bird notes or a feminine smile as lacking utility? There is neither utility nor inutility unless there be also finality. But finality can not be considered as an aim; it is nothing but a fact, and one which might be other.

This utilization of old terms, if it were possible, could never be the pretext for a new radical differentiation between instinct and intelligence; one could only use it to define by contrast two states whose manifestations present appreciable nuances. The great objection to the essential identification of instinct and intelligence comes from a habit of mind which spiritistic philosophy has for long imposed upon us: instinct should be unconscious, intelligence, conscious. But psychological analysis does not permit us rigorously to tie intellectual activity to consciousness. Without consciousness, every thing might happen, even in the most thoughtful man, exactly as it does under the paternal eye of this consciousness. In M. Ribot's interesting analogic comparison, consciousness is an interned candle lighting a clock-face; it has the same influence on the movement of the intelligence that this candle has on the clock. It is difficult to know whether animals have consciousness, and it is perhaps useless, unless at least, one admit that this candle, by its luminous or calorific rays, does, as M. Fouillée teaches, affect the march of the mechanism. In sum, consciousness also is a fact, and no fact dies without consequences; there are neither first causes nor last causes. In any case one will, since it is evident, cling to one statement that even if consciousness is a possible reactive, intelligence can act without it: the most conscious of men have phases of unconscious intellectuality; long series of reasonable acts may be committed without their reflection being visible in the mirror, without the candle being lit before the clock. In brief, it does not seem as if nervous matter could exist without intelligence or sensibility; but consciousness is an extra. There is no need to take count of the old scholastic objection to the identification of the intelligence and the instinct.

What is there serious in the other objection: that man, if he once had instincts, has lost them?

The animal having the richest instincts ought also to have, or to have had, the richest intelligence. And reciprocally: intellectual activity supposes a greatly varied instinctive activity, either in the present or in the future. If man have not instincts, he ought to be in the way of making them. He has numerous instincts, and makes more every day: a part of his consciousness is constantly crystallizing itself into instinctive acts.

But if one consider the different instincts of animal species one will scarcely find any which are not also human. The great human activities are instinctive. Doubtless man may refrain from building a palace, but he can not dispense with a cabin, a nest in a cave, or in the fork of a tree, like the great apes, many mammals, birds, and most insects. His food depends very little on choice, it must contain certain indispensable elements: a necessity identical with that which rules the animals, and even the plants whose roots reach down toward the desired juice, and whose branches reach toward the light. Song, dance, strife, and, for the group, war; human instincts are not unknown to all animals. The taste for brilliant things, another human instinct is frequent enough in birds; it is true that birds have not yet made anything of it, and that man has evolved the sumptuary arts. There remains love, but I think this supreme instinct is the consecrated limit of the objections.

Useful acts habitually repeated may become invincible, like veritable instinctive movements. A hunter[1]spending the winter in an isolated cabin in Canada engaged an Indian woman to keep house for him. She arrives in the evening, melts the snow, begins to wash up, shifts everything, prevents his getting any sleep. He rages. Silence. As soon as he is asleep, the woman mechanically begins to work again, and so on, until the humble Indian gets the last word. Here, exactly as among insects, one has the example of work which once begun must go on until it is finished. The insect can not be interrupted; if it is interrupted by external cause it starts work again not at the point where it actually finds the work, but at the point where it, the insect, left off. Thus, one entirely removed the nest which a chalicodome was building on a shingle; the bee returns, finds nothing, since there is nothing to find, but instead of recommencing the building, continues it. There was nothing to be done but close the hole; the bee closes it, that is to say she deposits the last mouthful of mortar on the ideal dome of an absent nest: then with instinct satisfied, sure of having assured her posterity, she retires, she goes to die. One can get the same result with the pélopée, and with other builders. Processional caterpillars are accustomed to make long trips in Indian file on the branches of their native pine-tree, in search of food: if one place them on the rim of a basin they will stupidly circulate for thirty hours, without one of them having the idea of interrupting the circle by going off at a tangent. They will die in their track, stuck fast in obedience; when one falls another steps into his place, the ranks close, that is all. Here are the extremities of instinct, and to our great surprise they are almost the same in an Indian of the great lakes and in a processional pine caterpillar.

But other cases of animal's instinct joining with free intelligence, give examples of human sagacity. We have seen these same mason bees and xylocopes and domestic bees profit eagerly by a nest ready made, by a hole bored in wood, by artificial combs set ready to take their honey; the osmies, who lay in the stalks of cut reeds, in which they arrange a series of chambers, accommodated themselves under Fabre's guidance in glass tubes which permitted the great observer to know them intimately. Instinct is by turns as stupid as a machine and as intelligent as a brain; these two extremes should correspond with very ancient and very recent habits. It is certainly but a relatively short time since the peasant's pruning-bill began preparing cut reeds for the osmie; before that time she constructed her nest, as she still does, in empty snail shells or in some natural cavity. They are very interesting these osmies, extremely active solitary bees; one sees them having exhausted their ovaries, but not their muscular force, building extra nests, provisioning them with honey, without having laid a single egg in them; they will even make and close them without honey, if they do not find more flowers, thus showing a real craziness for work, an authentic mania analogous to that which moves man to move pebbles, to smoke, to drink rather than remain immobile.[2]If the osmie lived longer, she might perhaps invent some game which, vain at the start, would end by becoming both a need and a benefit to the whole species.

The theory which makes instinct a partial crystallization of intelligence is extremely seductive: I dare say we will have to accept it as true. Yet the contemplation of the insect world raises an enormous objection. In the course of his wonderful memoirs Fabre has formulated it ten times and with always fresh ingenuity. Here is the insect, nearly always born adult, and after the death of her parents, she has received from them neither direct education nor education by example, as do the young of birds or mammals. A hen teaches her chick to scratch for worms (it is true that she does not teach her ducklings to dabble in puddles, and they are her despair, to our amusement), an osmie can teach its young nothing. Yet now osmies do exactly what their ancients have done. The insect opens its shell, brushes its antennæ, performs its toilet, opens its wings, flies off for life, moves without hesitation toward the pasture it needs, recognizes and flees the enemies of its race, makes love, and finally constructs a nest identical with the cradle from which it has emerged.[3]

One sees quite well that the acquisitions of the individual have passed to the descendant, but how? How have they fixed themselves in the nerves and blood during a few short days of life? Without any apprenticeship the sphex paralyzes with three stabs the cricket which is to feed its larvæ; if the cricket is killed and not paralyzed, the larvæ will die, poisoned by the carrion; and if the paralysis is not durable the cricket will come to, and destroy the sphex in the egg. The manœuvre of this wasp and of many other killing hymenoptera has this tiresome point for our reasoning, the act must be perfect, on pain of death. Nevertheless it must be admitted that the sphex has formed itself slowly, like all complex animals, and that its genius is only the sum of intellectual acquisition slowly crystallized in the specie.[4]As for the mechanism of this transformation of intelligence into instinct, it has for motive the principle of utility; intelligent acts which are useful for the preservation of the specie, are the only ones which pass into instinct.

The science of these hymenoptera goes so far that it was ahead of human science until yesterday. The insect attacks the nervous system; it knows that the power of beginning a movement lies in the nervous system and not in the limbs. If the nervous system is centralized as in weevils, their enemy the cerceris gives only one dagger-stab; if the movement depends on three ganglia, it gives three stabs; if on nine ganglia, nine: thus does the shaggy ammophile when it needs the caterpillar of the noctuelle, commonly called the gray worm, for its larvæ; if a single sting in the cervical ganglion appears too dangerous, the hunter limits himself to chewing it gently, in order to induce the necessary degree of immobility. It is odd that the social hymenoptera who know how to do so many difficult things, are ignorant of this savant dagger-play. The bee stings at random, and so brutally that she mutilates herself while often inflicting but an insignificant wound on her adversary. Collective civilization has diminished the individual genius.

[1]Vide Milton and Cheaddle, works already cited.

[2]Compare this with the valuable remarks of a gamekeeper, "One must know the habits of animals, even their manias, for they have them, just as we do." Figaro, 31, Aug. 1903.

[3]To my mind a slight unsoundness creeps into Chap. XVI, and here both Fabre and Gourmont seem to me to go astray in considering the insect as a separate creature, i. e. a creature cut off from its larva or cocoon life. Surely the animal may be supposed to exist while in its cocoon or larva, it may reasonably be supposed to pass that period in reflection, preparing for precisely the acts of its desire (as for example an intelligent young man might pass his years in a university under professors, awaiting reasonable maturity to act or express his objections). The larva has its months of quiet, precisely the necessary pre-reflection for the two days' joy-ride of exterior manifestation, amours, etc., itscontemplatio, or what may be counted as analogous, passing in its cell. The perfection and precision of its acts, being, let us say, proportionate to the non-expressive period. Having spent God knows how long in that possibly monotonous nest, it seems small wonder that the insect should know the pattern by heart. Small wonder, that is to say wonder not incommensurate with the general wonder of the whole process.—E. P.

[4]Vide translator's postscript.

Accord and discord between organs and acts.—Torses and sacred scarab.—The hand of man.—Mediocre fitness of sexual organs for copulation.—Origin of "luxuria."—The animal is a nervous system served by organs.—The organ does not determine the aptitude.—Man's hand inferior to his genius.—Substitution of one sense for another.—Union and rôle of the senses in love.—Man and animal under the tyranny of the nervous system.—Wear and tear of humanity compensated by acquisitions.—Man's inheritors.

It is a universal belief that nature or God, in their wisdom, have made the corporal organs in the best possible form: perfection of the eye, of the hand, of the paw-jaw of the mantis, of the sexual apparatus of man, of the bird or the scarab, the furnishing tarses of hymenoptera, the beaver's tail, the grasshopper's hams, the cicada's tambourine. It is sometimes true and very often false. It happens that there appears an exact concord between the organ and the act which it is to perform; but it happens also, and that not rarely, that the organs seem in no way fashioned for the deed they must accomplish: most of them are indeed chance tools, with which the creature manages, as he can, the acts which he wants to, or should, do.

The forefeet of scarabs are so little destined for modelling and rolling mud-balls that their tarses are worn out in the process, as human fingers would perhaps be worn if they had to knead the raw clay and mortar. In considering the scarab one has to think of a humanity lacking fingers, having lost them by a long and slow diminution of nails, bones, flesh. The scarab is a modeller, nothing would be more useful to him than fingers; instead of losing them by use, he ought to have grown them longer and more supple. He has lost them, and it is with the arm stumps that he turns the little balls which are to be food for himself or his offspring. This insect is condemned to a labour that will become increasingly difficult as the species grows increasingly older. It remains to know whether the ancestors of the sacred scarab had tarses. Horus Apollo grants them as many fingers as the month has days, that is thirty, which corresponds quite well with the six feet and five tarses of the scarab. If he was a good observer, the question is answered, but a single testimony is insufficient, and moreover it is unlikely that so great a wearing-away would have occurred in so small a number of centuries. Horus, and a savant like Latreille himself, have been the dupes of symmetry; if either has looked closely at a scarab, and if he has seen the forefeet lacking tarses, he has put this down to chance or to accident. Fabre has at least noted one indisputable fact, it is that neither as nymph nor adult has the scarab tarses on his forefeet. If it ever had them, our reasoning draws new vigour from the negation, for then less than ever is it possible to find the least logical concordance between the insect's stumps and the need of modelling and turning to which nature condemns it.

This scarab is a type to which one can relate a great number of other examples: purveyor hymenoptera are wholly deprived of tools adapted to their work as quarry-men and well-diggers: thus, at the end of their labours the greater part of these fragile insects are very much damaged. One knows the beaver's constructions, but who without the certitude we have gained by observation, would have dared to attribute them to these great rats?

Eighteenth century philosophers set themselves the question: Is man man because he has hands; or has he hands because he is man? One may answer boldly, that man's hands marvellous as they appear to us, add almost nothing to his intelligence. One does not see that they are indispensable for anything save for playing the piano. What constitutes man is his intelligence, his nervous system. The exterior organ is secondary: no matter what exterior organ, beak, prehensile tail, teeth, proboscis, paws would have done the work of the hands. There are birds' nests which no manual cleverness could weave.

The reproductive organs are no better adapted to their purpose than are the working organs. Doubtless they attain very often their end, but at the cost of efforts which a better disposition would have attenuated or eliminated altogether. The interior mechanism is, or seems, marvellous; the external mechanism is rudimentary and gives no result, save, as they say, thanks to the ever-renewed ingenuity of the couples. Instinct, in one of its most necessary acts, is often put to difficult proof. The plausible adventure of Daphnis has been presumably often repeated, even though the limberness of the human form is well suited to coition; but who has not been surprised to see a heavy bull leap clumsily onto a lowing cow, bending his useless hocks along her back, panting, and often not succeeding save thanks to the good offices of a farm hand? Among beavers, says A. de Quatrefages (Orbigny's "Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle"), the external orifice of the generative organs opens in a cloaca so placed under the tail that one hardly understands how the coupling takes place.

Certain matings are sheer tours de force, and the animal whether it be the scutilary, a tiny insect, or the elephant, a colossus, is compelled to take positions absolutely different from its normal postures. Nature who firmly intends the perpetuity of the species, has not yet found a simple and unique means thereto; or else, having found it, in budding, she has cast it aside to adopt the diversity of organs, means, and movements. There are none, even to those of our own specie which man may not criticize, even though he prize them; he has criticized, and his criticism has been to diversify them still further, which simplifies a fated necessity in making it pleasanter. Morals term this diversification "luxure."[1]This term is a pejorative which may be applied also to the exercise of our other senses. All is butluxuria.Luxuria, the variety of foods, their cooking, their seasoning, the culture of special garden plants;luxuria: the exercises of the eye, decoration, the toilet, painting;luxuria, music; luxuria, the marvellous exercises of the hand, so marvellous that direct hand work can be mimicked by a machine but never equalled;luxuria, flowers, perfumes;luxuria, rapid voyages; luxuria, the taste for landscape; luxuria, all art, science, civilization;luxuria, also the diversity of human gestures, for the animal in his virtuous sobriety has but one gesture for each sense, and that gesture unvarying; or if the gesture, as probable, undergoes a change, it is but a slow, invisible change, and there is at the end but one gesture. The animal is ignorant of diversity, of the accumulation of aptitudes; man alone is "luxurieux," is libidinous.

There is a principle which I will call the individualism of species. Each specie is an individual which profits as best it may, for its useful ends, by the instruments which have devolved to it. A specie of hymenoptera feels itself obliged to protect its eggs from new enemies, by digging holes in the ground; it makes use of the tools which it has, without taking count of the fact that these tools have not been made for excavation; it acts thus at pressure of necessity, as man climbs trees in a flood, or gets onto the roof in case of fire. The need is independent of the organ; it precedes it, and does not always create it. In the sexual act, need commands the gesture: the animal adapts itself to positions which are strange to it, and very difficult. Coupling is nearly always a grimace. One would say that nature has set the male organ here, and the female there, and left to specific ingenuity the care of effecting the junction.

It is, I think, permitted us to conclude from the mediocre fitness of animals to milieu, and of organs to acts, that it is not the milieu which absolutely fashions, or the organs which absolutely govern, the acts. One then feels oneself inclined to reaccept Bonald's definition of man, and even to find it admirable, just, and strict: An intelligence served by organs. Not "obeyed," not always, but served, service implying imperfection, a discord between the order and its fulfillment. But the phrase applies not to man only, and its spiritualistic origin in no way diminishes its aphoristic value; it qualifies every animal. The animal is a nervous centre, served by the different tools in which its branches terminate. It commands, and the tools, good or bad ones, obey. If they were incapable of performing their work, at least the essential parts of it, the animal would perish. There are forms of parasitism which seem to be the consequence of a general renunciation of organs; impotent to enter into direct relations with the outer world, unmanned by the softness of the muscles, the nervous system brings the skiff it was piloting into some harbour or other, and beaches it.

Fabre says, thinking particularly of insects: "The organ does not determine the aptitude." And this most aptly confirms Bonald's manner of seeing. Thrown in at the end of a chapter, with scarcely anything directly to justify it, this affirmation but gains in value. It is the conclusion, not of a dissertation, but of a long sequence of scientific observations. As for the facts that one can set inside it, they are innumerable; one would group them under two heads: The animal serves himself as best he can with the organs he possesses; he does not always make use of them. The flying-stag, the best armed of all our insects, is inoffensive; while the carabe, of peaceful appearance, is a formidable beast of prey. Apropos of the pill in which the scarab shuts its egg, the skill with which it is worked up and felted, in a dark hole by a stump-armed insect, Fabre says simply: "It gave me the idea of an elephant wanting to make lace." But in what insect will we see perfect accord of work and organ? In the bee? It would scarcely seem so. The bee uses for building, modelling, waxing, bottling honey, exactly the same organs that her sisters, the ammophile, bembex, sphex, ant, chalicodome, use for hollowing earth, excavating sand, making cellars, mud houses. The libellule does nothing with the hooks which render the termite dangerous, and she loafs, while her industrious brother, also neuroptera and nothing more, builds Himalayas.

The mole-cricket is so well organized for digging with her short powerful bow legs that she could cut sandstone: she frequents only the soft soil of gardens. The antophore, on the other hand, with no instruments save her mediocre mandibles, her velvet paws, forces the cement which holds the stone walls together, and bores the hardened earth of the slopes by the roadside.

Insects, like man, moreover, ask nothing better than to do nothing and to let their tools sleep; the xylocope, that fine violet bumble-bee, who ought to bore into wood, a gallery twice a hand's length wherein to lay her eggs, if she finds a suitable hole ready made, confines herself to the meagerest possible works of accommodation. In sum, the insects who like the saw-fly (tenthredes) use a precise instrument for a precise job, are almost rare.

Man's hand, to come back to this point, is useful to him because he is intelligent. In itself the hand is nothing. Proof, in the monkeys and rodents who use their hands only to climb trees, louse themselves, and crack nuts. Our five fingers! Really nothing is more broadcast in nature, where they are only a sign of age: the saurians have them, and are not a bit more clever thereby. It is without fingers, without hands, without members that the larvæ of insects construct for themselves marvellous mosaic shells, weave themselves tents in silk-floss, exercise the trades of plasterer, miner, and carpenter. But this hand of man, become the world's marvel, how inferior to his genius, and how he has had to lengthen it, refine it, complicate it, in order to obtain obedience to the increasingly precise orders of his intelligence. Has the hand created machines? Man's intelligence immeasureably surpasses his organs, and submerges them; it demands of them the impossible and the absurd: hence the railway, the telegraph, the microscope and everything which multiplies the power of organs which have become rudimentary in the face of the brains' exigence, the brain being our master, who has demanded also of the sexual organs more than they were able to give: it is to satisfy these orders that the bed of love has been scattered with so many dreams and rose-leaves.

It is difficult to make people understand that the eye sees, not because it is an eye, but because it is situated at the tip of some filaments of nerve which are sensitive to light. At the end of filaments sensitive to sound, the eye would hear. Doubtless it is adapted to its function, as the ear is to hearing, but this function is an effect, not a cause. Insects' eyes are very different from ours. One has spoken of the experiments of a German savant who wished to throw visual images on the brain without the eye's intervention. This is suspicious, but not absurd: insects are gifted certainly with the power to smell, but one has never been able to discover the organ in any single one of them; and, also, the rôle of the antennæ which seems very considerable in their life, remains very obscure, since the removal of these appendices has not always a measurable effect on their activity.[2]

Organs, evidently the most useful, are sometimes placed in a position which diminishes their value. Notice a resting horse, and another horse coming toward him (observation can be made quite easily in the streets of Paris), what is he to do to gauge the danger, and reconnoitre the movement? Look at the other horse? No. His eyes are made to look sideways, not forward. He uses his long ears, raises them, shifts their open side toward the noise. Reassured he lets them fall, and re-establishes his calm. The horse looks with his ears. The blinkers by which people pretend to make him look forward, merely blind him, and perhaps, thereby diminish his impressionability. Blind horses moreover do the same work as the others.

The senses, as one knows, are substitutable one for the other, in a certain degree; but in the normal state they seem rather to reinforce each other mutually, and lend each other a certain support. One does not shut the eyes to hear better, save when one has determined the source of the sound. And even then, is it to hear better? Is it not rather to reflect and to hear at the same time, to manage an interior concentration with which the eye, essentially an explorative organ, would interfere?

It is in love that this alliance of all the senses is most intimately exercised. In superior animals, as well as in man, each sense, together or in groups, comes to reinforce the genital sense. None remain inactive, eye, ear, scent, touch, even taste come into play. Thus one explains the gleam of plumage, the dance, song, sexual odours. The female eye, in birds, is more sensitive than the male eye; the contrary is true of humanity; but female birds and women are particularly moved by song or words. The two sexes in dogs have, equally, recourse to scent; sight seems to play but an insignificant rôle in their sexual access, since minuscule canine beasts do not fear to address themselves to monsters, which for man would be in proportion more than that of a mammoth. Insects before mating often caress each other with their mysterious antennæ; the male is sometimes given a sounding apparatus: cricket and grasshopper drum to charm their companions.

It is not necessary to explain how in humans, especially in the male, all the senses concur in the amour, at least when moral and religious prejudices do not stop their impetus. It should be so, in an animal so sensitive, and of so complex and multiple a sensibility. The abstention of a single sense from the coupling is enough to enfeeble the pleasure very greatly. The coldness of many women may proceed less from a diminution of their genital sense, than from the general mediocrity of their senses. Intelligence, being but the ripe fruit of the general sensibility, its intensity is very often found to be in a certain relation with the sexual sensibility. Absolute coldness might signify stupidity. There are, however, too many exceptions for one to generalize in this matter. It happens indeed that intelligence instead of being the sum total of the sensibility, is, so to speak, the deviation or transmutation. There remains very little sensibility; it is nearly all turned into intelligence.

Every organized animal has a master: its nervous system; and there is, doubtless, no real life save where a nervous system exists, be it the magnificent infinitely branching tree of mammals and birds, be it the double, knotted cord of the mollusks, or the nail head which is planted, in ascides, between the buccal and anal orifice. As soon as this new matter appears, it reigns despotically, and the unforeseen appears in the world. One would say a conqueror, or rather an intruder, a parasite come in by stealth, and lifting itself into the royal rôle.

Animals bear this tyranny better than man. Their master asks fewer things. Often it only asks one: to create a being in its exact likeness. The animal is sane, that is to say, ruled; man is mad, that is to say, out of rule: he has so many orders to execute at once, that he scarcely does any one well. In civilized countries he can hardly reproduce himself and the specie is in danger. It would disappear, if the means of protecting it did not compensate the sterility.

One can not say that humanity has attained its intellectual limits, although its physical evolution seems completed; but as superior human specimens are nearly always sterile, or capable of only mediocre posterity, it is found that, alone among values, intelligence is not transmitted by generation. Then the circle closes and the same effort ends ceaselessly in the same recommencement. However, even here, artificial means intervene, and the transmission of the acquisitions of intelligence is relatively assured by all sorts of instruments. This mechanism, much inferior to carnal generation, permits us, if the most exquisite forms of intelligence disappear as fast as they flower, to preserve at least part of their contents. Notions are transmitted, that is a result, even though most of them are vain, in default of sensibilities sufficiently powerful to assimilate them and make a real life of them.

Finally, if man ought to abdicate, which seems unlikely, animality is rich enough to raise up an inheritor. The candidates for humanity are in great number, and they are not those whom the crowd supposes. Who knows if our descendants may not some day find themselves faced with a rival, strong and in the flower of youth. Creation has not gone on strike, since man appeared: since making this monster, nature has continued her work: the human hazard might reproduce itself on the morrow.

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