Maeterlinck wrote wisely when he said:
The insect does not belong to our world. The other
animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life,
and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
wholly foreign to us. In spite of all we feel a sort of
earthly brotherhood with them.... There is something, on
the other hand, about the insect that does not belong to
the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One
would be inclined to say that the insect comes from
another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more
insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.
Certainly more cruel and monstrous than our own. Among the spiders, for
instance, the female eats the male and often devours her own young. The
scorpion does the same thing. I know of nothing like it among our land
animals outside the insect world.
The insects certainly live in a wonderland of which we have little
conception. All our powers are tremendously exaggerated in these little
people. Their power makes them acquainted with the inner molecular
constitution of matter far more intimately than we can attain to by our
coarse chemical analysis. Our world is agitated by vibrations, coarse
and fine, of which our senses can take in only the slower ones. If they
exceed three thousand a second, they become too shrill for our ears. It
is thought that the world of sound with the insects begins where ours
leaves off. The drums and tubes of insects' ears are very minute. What
would to us be a continuous sound is to them a series of separate blows.
We begin to hear blows as continuous sounds when they amount to about
thirty a second. The house-fly has about four thousand eye-lenses; the
cabbage butterfly, and the dragon-fly, about seventeen thousand; and
some species of beetles have twenty-five thousand. We cannot begin to
think in what an agitated world the insect lives, thrilling and
vibrating to a degree that would drive us insane. If we possessed the
same microscopic gifts, how would the aspect of the world be changed! We
might see a puff of smoke as a flock of small blue butterflies, or hear
the hum of a mosquito as the blast of a trumpet. On the other hand, so
much that disturbs us must escape the insects, because their senses are
too fine to take it in. Doubtless they do not hear the thunder or feel
the earthquake.
The insects are much more sensitive to heat and cold than we are, and
for reasons. The number of waves in the ether that gives us the
sensation of heat is three or four million millions a second. The number
of tremors required to produce red light is estimated at four hundred
and seventy-four million millions a second, and for the production of
violet light, six hundred and ninety-nine million millions a second. No
doubt the insects react to all these different degrees of vibration.
Those marvelous instruments called antennæ seem to put them in touch
with a world of which we are quite oblivious.
X
To how many things our lives have been compared!--to a voyage, with its
storms and adverse currents and safe haven at last; to a day with its
morning, noon, and night; to the seasons with their spring, summer,
autumn, and winter; to a game, a school, a battle.
In one of his addresses to workingmen Huxley compared life to a game of
chess. We must learn the names and the values and the moves of each
piece, and all the rules of the game if we hope to play it successfully.
The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the
universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature.
But it may be questioned if the comparison is a happy one. Life is not a
game in this sense, a diversion, an aside, or a contest for victory over
an opponent, except in isolated episodes now and then. Mastery of chess
will not help in the mastery of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle
where the forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are much more
vague and varied and intangible than are those of the chessboard. Life
is coöperation with other lives. We win when we help others to win. I
suppose business is more often like a game than is life--your gain is
often the other man's loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit your
rivals and competitors. But in a sane, normal life there is little that
suggests a game of any kind.
We must all have money, or its equivalent. There are the three
things--money, goods, labor--and the greatest of these is labor. Labor
is the sum of all values. The value of things is the labor it requires
to produce or to obtain them. Were gold plentiful and silver scarce, the
latter would be the more precious. The men at the plough and the hoe and
in the mines of coal and iron stand first. These men win from nature
what we all must have, and these things are none of them in the hands or
under the guardianship of some one who is trying to keep us from
obtaining them, or is aiming to take our aids and resources from us.
The chess simile has only a rhetorical value. The London workingmen to
whom Huxley spoke would look around them in vain to find in their
problems of life anything akin to a game of chess, or for any fruitful
suggestion in the idea. They were probably mechanics, tradesmen,
artisans, teamsters, boatmen, painters, and so on, and knew through
experience the forces with which they had to deal. But how many persons
who succeed in life have any such expert knowledge of the forces and
conditions with which they have to deal, as two chess-players have of
the pawns and knights and bishops and queens of the chessboard?
Huxley was nearly always impressive and convincing, and there was vastly
more logical force in his figures than in those of most writers.
Life may more truly be compared to a river that has its source in a
mountain or hillside spring, with its pure and sparking or foaming and
noisy youth, then its quieter and stronger and larger volume, and then
its placid and gently moving current to the sea. Blessed is the life
that is self-purifying, like the moving waters; that lends itself to
many noble uses, never breaking out of bonds and becoming a destructive
force.