THE AIM OF LIFE
The importance of the sexual act.--Its ineluctable
character.--Animals who live only to reproduce
themselves.--The strife for love, and for death.
--Females fecundated at the very instant of birth.
--The maintenance of life.
What is life's aim? Its maintenance.
But the very idea of an aim is a human illusion. There is neither
beginning, nor middle, nor end in the series of causes. What is has
been caused by what was, and what will be has for cause the existent.
One can neither conceive a point of rest nor a point of beginning.
Born of life, life will beget life eternally. She should, and wants
to. Life is characterized on earth by the existence of individuals
grouped into species, that is to say having the power, a male being
united with a female, to reproduce a similar being. Whether it be the
internal conjoining of protozoaires, or hermaphrodite fecundation, or
the coupling of insects or mammifers, the act is the same: it is common
to all that lives, and this not only to animals but to plants, and
possibly even to such minerals as are limited by a non-varying form. Of
all possible acts, in the possibility that we can imagine, the sexual
act is, therefore, the most important of all acts. Without it life
comes to an end, and it is absurd to suppose its absence, for in that
case thought itself disappears.
Revolt is useless against so evident a necessity. Our finikin scruples
protest in vain; man and the most disgusting of his parasites are the
products of an identical sexual mechanism. The flowers we have strewn
upon love may disguise it as one disguises a trap for wild beasts; all
our activities manœuvre along the edge of this precipice and fall over
it one after another; the aim of human life is the continuation of
human life.
Only in appearance does man escape this obligation of Nature. He
escapes as an individual, and he submits as a species. The abuse of
thought, religious prejudices, vices sterilize a part of humanity;
but this fraction is of merely sociological interest; be he chaste
or voluptuary, miserly or prodigal of his flesh, man is in his whole
condition subject to the sexual tyranny. All men do not reproduce their
species, neither do all animals; the feeble and the late-comers among
insects die in their robe of innocence, and many nests laboriously
filled by courageous mothers are devastated by pirates or by the
inclemency of the sky. Let the ascetic not come boasting that he has
freed his blood from the pressure of desire; the very importance which
he ascribes to his victory but affirms the same power of the life-will.
A young girl, before the slightest love affair, will, if she is
healthy, confess naively that she "wants to marry to have children."
This so simple formula is the legend of Nature. What an animal seeks
is not its own life but reproduction. Doubtless many animals seem,
during a relatively long existence, to have but brief sexual periods,
but one must make allowance for the period of gestation. In principle
the sole occupation of any creature is to renew, by the sex act,
the form wherewith it is clothed. To this end it eats, to this end
builds. This act is so clearly the aim, unique and definite that it
constitutes the entire life of a very great number of animals, which
are, notwithstanding, extremely complex.
The ephemera is born in the evening, and copulates, the female lays
eggs during the night, both are dead in the morning, without even
having looked at the sun. These little animals are so little destined
for anything else save love that they have not even mouths. They eat
not, neither do they drink. One sees them hovering in clouds above
the water, among the reeds. The males, although more numerous than
the females, perform a multiple duty, and fall exhausted. The purity
of such a life is to be admired in many butterflies: the silk-moths,
heavy and clumsy, shake their wings for an instant at birth, couple
and die. The Great Peacock or Oak Bombyx, much larger than they, eats
no more than they do: yet we see him traverse leagues of country in
his quest of the female. He has only a rudimentary proboscis and a
fake digestive apparatus. Thus his two or three days' existence passes
without one egoistic act. The struggle for life, much vaunted, is here
the struggle to give life, the struggle for death, for if they can live
three days in search of the female they die as soon as the fecundation
is accomplished.
Among all solitary bees, scolies, masons, bembex, and anthopores,
the males born soonest, range about the nests awaiting the birth of
the females. As soon as these appear they are seized and fecundated,
knowing, thus, life and love in the same shiver. The female osmies and
other bees are keenly watched by the males who nab and mount them as
they emerge from the natal tube, the hollow stalk of a reed, flying
at once with them into the air where the love-feast is finished. Then
while the male, drunk with his work, continues his death-flight, the
female feverishly hollows the house of her offspring, partitions it,
stores the honey for the larvæ, lays, whirls for an instant and dies.
The year following: the same gestures above the same reeds split by
the reed-gatherers; and thus in years following, the insect permitted
never the least design save the conservation of one fragile form; brief
apparition over flowers.
The sitaris is a coleopterous parasite in the nests of the anthopore.
Copulation takes place on hatching. Fabre noticed a female still in her
wrappings, whom a male already free was helping to get loose, waiting
only the appearance of the extremity of the abdomen, to hurl himself
thereupon. The sitaris' love lasts one minute, long season in a short
life: the male drags on for two days before dying, the female lays on
the very spot where she has been fecundated, dies, having known nothing
but the maternal function in the strictest limit of her birthplace.
No one has ever seen the female palingenia. This butterfly is
fecundated before even getting rid of her nymph's corset, she dies with
her eyes still shut, mother, at once, and infant in swaddling clothes.
Moralists love bees from whom they distil examples and aphorisms. They
recommend us work, order, economy, foresight, obedience and divers
virtues other. Abandon yourself boldly to labour: Nature wills it.
Nature wills everything. She is complacent to all the activities; to
our imaginings there is no analogy that she will refuse, not one. She
desires the social constructions of bees; she desires also the Life All
Love of the "Great Peacock," of the osmie, of the sitaris. She desires
that the forms she has created shall continue indefinitely, and to this
end all means are, to her, good. But if she presents us the laborious
example of the bee, she does not hide from us the polyandrous example,
nor the cruel amours of the mantis. There is not in the will to live
the faintest trace of our poor little human morality. If one wishes an
unique sole morality, that is to say an universal commandment, which
all species may listen to, which they can follow in spirit and in
letter, if one wishes in short to know the "aim of life" and the duty
of the living, it is necessary, evidently, to find a formula which will
totalize all the contradictions, break them and fuse them into a sole
affirmation. There is but one, we may repeat it, without fear, and
without allowing any objection: the aim of life is life's continuation.