e of most insects is nothing
but ceaseless labour to prepare food and an abode for the future brood
which will arise from their eggs, and which then, after they have
consumed the food and passed through the chrysalis state, enter upon
life merely to begin again from the beginning the same labour; then also
how, like this, the life of the birds is for the most part taken up with
their distant and laborious migrations, then with the building of their
nests and the collection of food for their brood, which itself has to
play the same role the following year; and so all work constantly for
the future, which afterwards makes bankrupt--then we cannot avoid
looking round for the reward of all this skill and trouble, for the end
which these animals have before their eyes, which strive so
ceaselessly--in short, we are driven to ask: What is the result? What is
attained by the animal existence which demands such infinite
preparation? And there is nothing to point to but the satisfaction of
hunger and the sexual instinct, or in any case a little momentary
comfort, as it falls to the lot of each animal individual, now and then
in the intervals of its endless need and struggle. Take, for example,
the mole, that unwearied worker. To dig with all its might with its
enormous shovel claws is the occupation of its whole life; constant
night surrounds it; its embryo eyes only make it avoid the light. It
alone is truly an _animal nocturnum_; not cats, owls, and bats, who see
by night. But what, now, does it attain by this life, full of trouble
and devoid of pleasure? Food and the begetting of its kind; thus only
the means of carrying on and beginning anew the same doleful course in
new individuals. In such examples it becomes clear that there is no
proportion between the cares and troubles of life and the results or
gain of it. The consciousness of the world of perception gives a certain
appearance of objective worth of existence to the life of those animals
which can see, although in their case this consciousness is entirely
subjective and limited to the influence of motives upon them. But the
_blind_ mole, with its perfect organization and ceaseless activity,
limited to the alternation of insect larvae and hunger, makes the
disproportion of the means to the end apparent.

Let us now add the consideration of the human race. The matter indeed
becomes more complicated, and assumes a certain seriousness of aspect;
but the fundamental charact