ses pain. But in the
world which I am asking you to imagine there could not be any wrong, nor
any pleasure in wrong-doing; all the pleasure would be in right-doing. To
give a very simple illustration--one of the commonest and most pardonable
faults of young people is eating, drinking, or sleeping too much. But in
our imaginary world to eat or to drink or to sleep in even the least
degree more than is necessary could not be done; the constitution of the
race would not permit it. One more illustration. Our children have to be
educated carefully in regard to what is right or wrong; in the world of
which I am speaking, no time would be wasted in any such education, for
every child would be born with full knowledge of what is right and wrong.
Or to state the case in psychological language--I mean the language of
scientific, not of metaphysical, psychology--we should have a world in
which morality would have been transmuted into inherited instinct. Now
again let me put the question: can we imagine such a world? Perhaps you
will answer, Yes, in heaven--nowhere else. But I answer you that such a
world actually exists, and that it can be studied in almost any part of
the East or of Europe by a person of scientific training. The world of
insects actually furnishes examples of such a moral transformation. It is
for this reason that such writers as Sir John Lubbock and Herbert Spencer
have not hesitated to say that certain kinds of social insects have
immensely surpassed men, both in social and in ethical progress.

But that is not all that it is necessary to say here. You might think that
I am only repeating a kind of parable. The important thing is the opinion
of scientific men that humanity will at last, in the course of millions of
years, reach the ethical conditions of the ants. It is only five or six
years ago that some of these conditions were established by scientific
evidence, and I want to speak of them. They have a direct bearing upon
important ethical questions; and they have startled the whole moral world,
and set men thinking in entirely new directions.

In order to explain how the study of social insects has set moralists of
recent years thinking in a new direction, it will be necessary to
generalize a great deal in the course of so short a lecture. It is
especially the social conditions of the ants which has inspired these new
ideas; but you must not think that any one species of ants furnishes us
with all the facts