. Just like millstones unable to cease revolving though there be
no corn left to grind, let them once be given the compelling power and
they will continue to perform their task despite its futility. Are they
then machines? Far be it from me to think anything so foolish.

It is impossible to make definite progress on the shifting sands
of contradictory facts: each step in our interpretation may find us
embogged. And yet these facts speak so loudly that I do not hesitate
to translate their evidence as I understand it. In insect mentality, we
have to distinguish two very different domains. One of these is INSTINCT
properly so called, the unconscious impulse that presides over the
most wonderful part of what the creature achieves. Where experience and
imitation are of absolutely no avail, instinct lays down its inflexible
law. It is instinct and instinct alone that makes the mother build for a
family which she will never see; that counsels the storing of
provisions for the unknown offspring; that directs the sting towards the
nerve-centres of the prey and skilfully paralyses it, so that the game
may keep good; that instigates, in fine, a host of actions wherein
shrewd reason and consummate science would have their part, were the
creature acting through discernment.

This faculty is perfect of its kind from the outset, otherwise the
insect would have no posterity. Time adds nothing to it and takes
nothing from it. Such as it was for a definite species, such it is
to-day and such it will remain, perhaps the most settled zoological
characteristic of them all. It is not free nor conscious in its
practice, any more than is the faculty of the stomach for digestion
or that of the heart for pulsation. The phases of its operations are
predetermined, necessarily entailed one by another; they suggest a
system of clock-work wherein one wheel set in motion brings about the
movement of the next. This is the mechanical side of the insect,
the fatum, the only thing which is able to explain the monstrous
illogicality of a Pelopaeus when misled by my artifices. Is the Lamb
when it first grips the teat a free and conscious agent, capable of
improvement in its difficult art of taking nourishment? The insect is no
more capable of improvement in its art, more difficult still, of giving
nourishment.

But, with its hide-bound science ignorant of itself, pure insect, if it
stood alone, would leave the insect unarmed in the perpetual conflict
of