The Spirit of the Hive, which Maeterlinck makes so much of, seems to
give us the key to the psychic life of all the lower orders. What one
knows, all of that kind seem to know at the same instant. It seems as if
they drew it in with the air they breathed. It is something like
community of mind, or unity of mind. Of course it is not an intellectual
process, but an emotional process; not a thought, as with us, but an
impulse.
So far as we know there is nothing like a council or advisory board in
the hive. There are no decrees or orders. The swarm is a unit. The
members act in concert without direction or rule. If anything happens to
the queen, if she is lost or killed, every bee in the hive seems to know
it at the same instant, and the whole swarm becomes greatly agitated.
The division of labor in the hive is spontaneous: the bees function and
coöperate as do the organs in our own bodies, each playing its part
without scheme or direction.
This community of mind is seen in such an instance as that of the
migrating lemmings from the Scandinavian peninsula. Vast hordes of these
little creatures are at times seized with an impulse to migrate or to
commit suicide, for it amounts to that. They leave their habitat in
Norway and, without being deflected by any obstacle, march straight
toward the sea, swimming lakes and rivers that lie in their way. When
the coast is reached, they enter the water and continue on their course.
Ship captains report sailing for hours through waters literally alive
with them. This suicidal act of the lemmings strikes one as a kind of
insanity. It is one of the most puzzling phenomena I know of in animal
life. But the migration of all animals on a large scale shows the same
unity of purpose. The whole tribe shares in a single impulse. The annual
migration of the caribou in the North is an illustration. In the
flocking birds this unity of mind is especially noticeable. The vast
armies of passenger pigeons which we of an older generation saw in our
youth moved like human armies under orders. They formed a unit. They
came in countless hordes like an army of invasion, and they departed in
the same way. Their orders were written upon the air; their leaders were
as intangible as the shadows of their wings. The same is true of all our
flocking birds; a flock of snow buntings, or of starlings, or of
blackbirds, will act as one body, performing their evolutions in the air
with astonishing precision.
In Florida, in the spring when the mating-instinct is strong, I have
seen a flock of white ibises waltzing about the sky, going through
various intricate movements, with the precision of dancers in a ballroom
quadrille. No sign, no signal, no guidance whatever. Let a body of men
try it under the same conditions, and behold the confusion, and the
tumbling over one another! At one moment the birds would wheel so as to
bring their backs in shadow, and then would flash out the white of their
breasts and under parts. It was like the opening and shutting of a giant
hand, or the alternate rapid darkening and brightening of the sail of a
tacking ice-boat. This is the spirit of the flock. When a hawk pursues a
bird, the birds tack and turn as if linked together. When one robin
dashes off in hot pursuit of another, behold how their movements exactly
coincide! The hawk-hunted bird often escapes by reaching the cover of a
tree or a bush, but not by dodging its pursuer, as a rabbit or a
squirrel will dodge a dog. Schools of fish act with the same
machine-like unity.
In the South, I have seen a large area of water, acres in extent,
uniformly agitated by a school of mullets apparently feeding upon some
infusoria on the surface, and then instantly, as if upon a given signal,
the fish would dive and the rippling cease. It showed a unity of action
as of ten thousand spindles controlled by electricity.
How quickly the emotion of fear is communicated among the wild animals!
How wild and alarmed the deer become after the opening of the first day
of the shooting season. Those who have not seen or heard a hunter seem
to feel the impending danger.
The great flocks of migrating butterflies (the monarch) illustrate the
same law. In the fall they are all seized with this impulse to go South
and thousands of them march in one body. At night they roost in the
trees. I have seen photographs of them in which they appeared like a new
kind of colored foliage covering the trees. In the return flight in the
spring, the same massing again occurs. Recently the Imperial Valley in
California was invaded by a vast army of worms moving from east to west.
In countries that have been cursed with a plague of grasshoppers
witnesses of the spectacle describe them as moving in the same way. They
stopped or delayed railway trains and automobiles, their crushed bodies
making the rails and highways as slippery as grease would have made
them. Ten million or ten billion behaving as one.
This community of mind stands the lower orders in great stead. It makes
up to them in a measure for the want of reason and judgment. In what we
call telepathy we get hints of the same thing among ourselves. Telepathy
is probably a survival from our earlier animal state.