SUICIDE OR HYPNOSIS?
You do not imitate the unfamiliar; you do not counterfeit a thing of
which you know nothing: that is obvious. The simulation of death,
therefore, implies a certain knowledge of death.
Well, has the insect, or rather, has any kind of animal, a
presentiment that its life cannot last for ever? Does the perturbing
problem of an end occur to its dense brain? I have associated a great
deal with animals, I have lived on intimate terms with them and I have
never observed anything to justify me in saying yes. The animal, with
its humbler destiny, is spared that apprehension of the hour of death
which constitutes at once our torment and our greatness.
Like the child still in the limbo of unconsciousness, it enjoys the
present without taking thought of the future; free from the bitterness
of a prospective ending, it lives in the blissful calm of ignorance.
It is ours alone to foresee the briefness of our days; it is ours
alone anxiously to question the grave regarding the last sleep.
Moreover, this glimpse of the inevitable destruction calls for a
certain maturity of mind and, for that reason, is rather late in
developing. I had a touching example of it this very week.
A pretty little Kitten, the joy of all the household, after languidly
dragging itself about for a couple of days, died in the night. Next
morning the children found it lying stark in its basket. General
affliction. Anna, especially, a little girl of four, considered with a
pensive glance the little friend with which she had so often played.
She petted it, called it, offered it a drop of milk in a cup:
"Kitty won't play," said the child. "She doesn't want my breakfast any
more. She's asleep. I've never seen her sleep like this before. When
will she wake up?"
This simplicity in the presence of death's harsh problem wrung my
heart. Hastily I led the girl away from the sight and had the dead
Kitten secretly buried. As, from this time onward, it no longer
appeared by the table at meal-times, the grief-stricken child at last
understood that she had seen her little friend sleeping the profound
slumber that knows no awaking. For the first time a vague idea of
death found its way into her mind.
Has the insect the signal honour of knowing what we do not know in our
early childhood, at a time when thought is already manifesting itself,
far superior, however feeble it be, to the dull understanding of the
animal? Has it the power to foresee an ending, an attribute which in
its case would be inconvenient and useless? Before deciding, let us
consult, not the abstruse theories of science, a doubtful guide, but
the Turkey, an eminently truthful one.
I recall one of the most vivid memories that remain to me from my
brief sojourn at the Royal College of Rodez. So they called it then;
to-day they call it a grammar-school; what improvement as the world
grows older!
The thrice-blessed Thursday had come; our bit of translation was done,
our dozen Greek roots had been learnt by heart; and we trooped down to
the far end of the valley, so many bands of madcaps. With our trousers
turned up to our knees, we exploited, artless fishermen that we were,
the peaceful waters of the river, the Aveyron. What we hoped to catch
was the Loach, no bigger than our little finger, but tempting, thanks
to his immobility on the sand amid the waterweeds. We fully expected
to transfix him with our trident, a fork.
This miraculous catch, the object of such shouts of triumph when it
succeeded, was very rarely vouchsafed to us: the Loach, the rascal,
saw the fork coming and with three strokes of his tail disappeared!
We found compensation in the apple-trees in the neighbouring pastures.
The apple has from all time been the urchin's delight, above all when
plucked from a tree which does not belong to him. Our pockets were
soon crammed with the forbidden fruit.
Another distraction awaited us. Flocks of Turkeys were not rare,
roaming at their own sweet will and gobbling up the Locusts around the
farms. If no watcher hove in sight, we had great sport. Each of us
would seize a Turkey, tuck her head under her wing, rock it in this
attitude for a moment and then place her on the ground, lying on her
side. The bird no longer budged. The whole flock of Turkeys was
subjected to our hypnotic handling; and the meadow assumed the aspect
of a battle-field strewn with the dead and dying.
And now look out for the farmer's wife! The loud gobbling of the
harassed birds had told her of our wicked pranks. She would run up
armed with a whip. But we had good legs in those days! And we had a
good laugh too, behind the hedges, which favoured our retreat!
O delightful days when we put the Turkeys to sleep, can I recover the
skill which I then possessed? To-day it is no longer the playful trick
of a schoolboy; it is a matter of serious research. I happen to have
the very subject that I need: a Turkey-hen, doomed soon to be the
victim of our Christmas merry-making. I repeat with her the method of
manipulation which I employed so successfully on the banks of the
Aveyron. I tuck her head well under her wing and, molding it in this
attitude with both hands, I rock the bird gently up and down for a
couple of minutes.
The strange effect is produced; my childhood's manoeuvres obtained no
better result. Laid on the ground, on her side and left to herself, my
patient is a lifeless bundle. One would think her dead, if a slight
rise and fall of the plumage did not reveal the breathing. She looks
really like a dead bird which, in a last convulsion, had drawn its
chilled feet, with their shrivelled toes, under its belly. The
spectacle has a tragic air; and I feel overcome by a certain anxiety
when I gaze upon the results of my evil spells. Poor Turkey! What if
she were never to wake again!
We need not be afraid: she is waking; she stands up, staggering a
little, it is true, with drooping tail and a shamefaced expression.
That soon passes off; not a trace of it remains. In a few moments the
bird is once more what it was before the experiment.
This torpor, the mean between true sleep and death, is of variable
duration. When repeatedly provoked in my Turkey-hen, with suitable
intervals of repose, immobility lasts sometimes for half an hour and
sometimes for a few minutes. Here, as in the insect, it would be very
difficult to analyse the causes of these differences. With the
Guinea-fowl I succeed even better. The torpor lasts so long that I
become alarmed by the bird's condition. The plumage reveals no trace
of breathing. I ask myself, anxiously, whether the bird is not
actually dead. I push it a little way along the ground with my foot.
The patient does not stir. I do it again. And lo, the Guinea-fowl
frees her head, stands up, regains her balance and scurries off! Her
state of lethargy has lasted more than half an hour.
Now for the Goose. I have none. The gardener next door trusts me with
his. She is brought to my house, which she fills with her trumpeting
as she waddles about. Shortly afterwards there is absolute silence:
the web-footed Amazon is lying on the ground, with her head tucked
under her wing. Her immobility is as profound and as prolonged as that
of the Turkey and the Guinea-fowl.
It is the Hen's turn now and the Duck's. They too succumb, but, so it
seems to me, less persistently. Can it be that my hypnotic tricks are
less efficacious with small birds than with large ones? To judge by
the Pigeon, this may well be so. He yields to my art only to the
extent of two minutes' sleep. A still smaller bird, a Greenfinch, is
even more refractory: all that I obtain from him is a few seconds'
drowsiness.
It would appear, then, that, in proportion as the activity is
concentrated in a body of less volume, the torpor has less hold. The
insect has already shown us this. The Giant Scarites does not stir for
an hour, while the Smooth-skinned Scarites, a pigmy, wearies my
persistence in turning him over; the large Cloudy Buprestis submits to
my manoeuvres for a long period, whereas the Glittering Buprestis, a
pigmy again, obstinately refuses to do so.
We will leave on one side, as insufficiently investigated, the
influence of the bodily mass and remember only this fact, that it is
possible, by a very simple artifice, to reduce a bird to a condition
of apparent death. Do my Goose, my Turkey and the others resort to
trickery with the object of deceiving their tormentor? It is certain
that none of them thinks of shamming dead; they are actually immersed
in a deep torpor; in a word, they are hypnotized.
These facts have long been known; they are perhaps the first in date
in the science of hypnosis or artificial sleep. How did we, the little
Rodez schoolboys, learn the secret of the Turkey's slumber? It was
certainly not in our books. Coming from no one knows where,
indestructible as everything that enters into children's games, it was
handed down, from time immemorial, from one initiate to another.
Things are just the same to-day in my village of Serignan, where there
are numbers of youthful adepts in the art of putting poultry to sleep.
Science often has very humble beginnings. There is nothing to tell us
that the mischief of a pack of idle urchins is not the starting-point
of our knowledge of hypnosis.
I have just been practising on insects tricks which to all appearances
are as puerile as those which we practised on the Turkeys in the days
when the farmer's wife used to run after us cracking her whip. Do not
laugh: a serious problem looms behind this artlessness.
My insects' condition bears a strange resemblance to that of my
poultry. Both present the image of death, inertia, the contraction of
convulsed limbs. In both again the immobility is dispelled before its
time by the agency of a stimulus, by sound in the case of the bird, by
light in that of the insect. Silence, darkness and tranquillity
prolong it. Its duration varies greatly in different species and
appears to increase with corpulence.
Among ourselves, who are very unequal subjects for induced sleep, the
hypnotist is obliged to pick and choose. He succeeds with one and not
with another. Similarly, among the insects, a selection is necessary,
for they do not all of them, by a long way, respond to the
experimenter's attempts. My best subjects have been the Giant Scarites
and the Cloudy Buprestis; but how many others have resisted quite
indomitably, or remained motionless for only a few seconds!
The insect's return to the active state presents certain peculiarities
which are well worthy of attention. The key to the problem lies here.
Let us return for a moment to the patients who have been subjected to
the ordeal of ether. These are really hypnotized. They do not remain
motionless by way of a ruse, there is no doubt upon that point; they
are actually on the threshold of death; and, if I did not take them in
good time out of the flask in which a few drops of ether have been
evaporated, they would never recover from the torpor whose last stage
is death.
Now what symptoms herald their return to activity? We know the
symptoms: the tarsi tremble, the palpi quiver, the antennae wave to
and fro. A man emerging from a deep sleep stretches his limbs, yawns
and rubs his eyes. The insect awaking from the etheric sleep likewise
has its own fashion of marking its recovery of consciousness: it
flutters its tiny digits and the more mobile of its organs.
Let us now consider an insect which, upset by a shock, perturbed by
some sort of excitement, is believed to be shamming dead, lying on its
back. The return to activity is announced exactly in the same fashion
and in the same order as after the stupefying effect of ether. First
the tarsi quiver; then the palpi and antennae wave feebly to and fro.
If the creature were really shamming, what need would it have of these
minute preliminaries to the awakening? Once the danger has
disappeared, or is deemed to have done so, why does the insect not
swiftly get upon its feet, to make off as quickly as possible, instead
of dallying with untimely pretences? I am quite sure that, once the
Bear was gone, the comrade who had shammed dead under the animal's
nose did not think of wasting time in stretching himself or rubbing
his eyes. He jumped up at once and took to his heels.
And the insect is supposed to carry its cunning to the length of
counterfeiting resuscitation down to the least details! No, no and
again no; it would be madness. Those quiverings of the tarsi, those
awakening movements of the palpi and antennae are the obvious proof of
a genuine torpor, now coming to an end, a torpor similar to that
induced by ether but less intense; they show that the insect struck
motionless by my artifice is not shamming dead, as the vulgar idiom
has it and as the fashionable theories repeat. It is really
hypnotized.
A shock which disturbs its nerve-centres, an abrupt fright which
seizes upon it reduce it to a state of somnolence like that of the
bird which is swung for a second or two with its head under its wing.
A sudden terror sometimes deprives us human beings of the power of
movement, sometimes kills us. Why should not the insect's organism, so
delicate and subtle, give way beneath the grip of fear and momentarily
succumb? If the emotion be slight, the insect shrinks into itself for
an instant, quickly recovers and makes off; if it be profound,
hypnosis supervenes, with its prolonged immobility.
The insect, which knows nothing of death and therefore cannot
counterfeit it, knows nothing either of suicide, that desperate means
of cutting short excessive misery. No authentic example has ever been
given, to my knowledge, of an animal of any kind robbing itself of its
own life. That those most richly endowed with the capacity of
affection sometimes allow themselves to die of grief I grant you; but
there is a great difference between this and stabbing one's self or
cutting one's throat.
Yet the recollection occurs to me of the Scorpion's suicide, sworn to
by some, denied by others. What truth is there in the story of the
Scorpion who, surrounded by a circle of fire, puts an end to his
suffering by stabbing himself with his poisoned sting? Let us see for
ourselves:
Circumstances favour me. I am at this moment rearing, in large earthen
pans, with a bed of sand and with potsherds for shelter, a hideous
menagerie which hardly comes up to my expectations as regards the
study of morals.[1] I will profit by it in another way. It consists of
some twenty-four specimens of _Buthus occitanus_, the large White
Scorpion of the south of France. The odious animal abounds, always
isolated, under the flat stones of the neighbouring hills, in the
sandy spots which enjoy the most sunlight. It has a detestable
reputation.
[Footnote 1: For the habits of the White or Languedocian Scorpion, cf.
_The Life and Love of the Insect_: chaps. xvii. and
xviii.--_Translator's Note_.]
On the effects of its sting I personally have nothing to say, having
always avoided, by a little caution, the danger to which my relations
with the formidable captives in my study might have exposed me.
Knowing nothing of it myself, I get people to tell me of it,
wood-cutters in particular, who from time to time fall victims to
their imprudence. One of them tells me the following story:
"After having my dinner, I was dozing for a moment among my faggots,
when I was roused by a sharp pain. It was like the prick of a red-hot
needle. I clapped my hand to the place. Sure enough, there was
something moving! A Scorpion had crept under my trousers and stung me
in the lower part of the calf. The ugly beast was full as long as my
finger. Like that, sir, like that!"
And, adding gesture to speech, the worthy man extended his great
fore-finger. This size did not surprise me: while insect-hunting, I
have seen Scorpions as large.
"I wanted to go on with my work," he continued, "but I came out in a
cold sweat; and my leg swelled up so you could see it swelling. It got
as big as that, sir, as big as that."
More mimicry. Our friend spreads his two hands round his leg, at a
distance, so as to denote the girth of a small barrel:
"Yes, like that, sir, like that; I had great trouble to get home,
though it was only half a mile away. The swelling crept up and up.
Next day it had got so high."
A gesture indicates the height.
"Yes, sir, for three days I couldn't stand up. I bore it as well as I
could, with my leg stretched out on a chair. Soda-compresses did the
trick; and there you are, sir, there you are."
Another woodcutter, he adds, was also stung in the lower part of the
leg. He was binding faggots together at some distance and had not the
strength to regain his home. He collapsed by the side of the road.
Some men passing by carried him on their shoulders:
"_A la cabro morto, moussu, a la cabro morto!_"
The story of the rustic narrator, more versed in mimicry than in
speech, does not seem to me exaggerated. A White Scorpion's sting is a
very serious accident for a human being. When stung by his own kind,
the Scorpion himself quickly succumbs. Here I have something better
than the evidence of strangers: I have my own observations.
I take two healthy specimens from my menagerie and place them together
at the bottom of a glass jar on a layer of sand. Excited with the tip
of a straw which brings them face to face again whenever they draw
back, the two harassed creatures decide on mortal combat. Each no
doubt attributes to the other the annoyances of which I myself am the
cause. The claws, those weapons of defence, are displayed in a
semicircle and open to keep the adversary at a distance; the tails, in
sudden jerks, are flung forward above the back; the poison-phials
clash together; a tiny drop, limpid as water, beads the point of the
sting.
The fight does not last long. One of the Scorpions receives the full
force of the other's poisoned weapon. It is all over: in a few minutes
the wounded one succumbs. The victor very calmly proceeds to gnaw the
fore-part of the victim's cephalothorax, or, in less crabbed terms,
the bit at which we look for a head and find only the entrance to a
belly. The mouthfuls are small, but long-drawn-out. For four or five
days, almost without a break, the cannibal nibbles at his murdered
comrade. To eat the vanquished, that's good warfare, the only sort
excusable. What I do not understand, nor shall until we tin the meat
on the battle-field for food, is our wars between nations.
We now have authentic information: the Scorpion's sting is fatal,
promptly fatal, to the Scorpion himself. Let us come to the matter of
suicide, such as it has been described to us. When surrounded by a
circle of live embers, the animal, so we are told, stabs itself with
its sting and finds an end of its torment in voluntary death. This
would be very fine on the creature's part if it were true. We shall
see.
In the centre of a ring of burning charcoal, I place the largest
specimen from my menagerie. The bellows increase the glow. At the
first smart of the heat, the animal moves backwards within the circle
of fire. It collides by inadvertence with the burning barrier. Now
follows a disorderly retreat, in every direction, at random, renewing
the agonizing contact. At each attempt to escape, the burning is
repeated more severely than before. The animal becomes frantic. It
darts forward and scorches itself. In a desperate frenzy, it
brandishes its weapon, crooks it, straightens it, lays it down flat
and raises it again, all with such disorderly haste that I am quite
unable to follow its movements accurately.
The moment ought to have come for the Scorpion to release himself from
his torture with a blow of the stiletto. And indeed, with a sudden
spasm, the long-suffering creature becomes motionless, lies at
full-length, flat upon the ground. There is not a movement; the
inertia is complete. Is the Scorpion dead? It really looks like it.
Perhaps he has pinked himself with a thrust of his sting that escaped
me in the turmoil of the last efforts. If he has actually stabbed
himself, if he has resorted to suicide, then he is dead beyond a
doubt: we have just seen how quickly he succumbs to his own venom.
In my uncertainty, I pick up the apparently dead body with the tip of
my forceps and lay it on a bed of cool sand. An hour later, the
alleged corpse returns to life, as lusty as before the ordeal. I
repeat the process with a second and third specimen. The results are
the same. After the frantic plunges of the desperate victim, we have
the same sudden inertia, with the creature sprawling flat as though
struck by lightning, and the same return to life on the cool sand.
It seems probable that those who invented the story of the Scorpion
committing suicide were deceived by this sudden swoon, this paralysing
spasm, into which the high temperature of the enclosure throws the
exasperated beast. Too quickly convinced, they left the victim to burn
to death. Had they been less credulous and withdrawn the animal in
good time from its circle of fire, they would have seen the apparently
dead Scorpion return to life and thus assert its profound ignorance of
suicide.
Apart from man, no living thing knows the last resource of a voluntary
end, because none has a knowledge of death. As for us, to feel that we
have the power to escape from the miseries of life is a noble
prerogative, upon which it is good to meditate, as a sign of our
elevation above the commonalty of the animal world; but in point of
fact it becomes cowardice if from the possibility we pass to action.
He who proposes to go to that length should at least repeat to himself
what Confucius, the great philosopher of the yellow race, said
five-and-twenty centuries ago. Having surprised a stranger in the
woods fixing to the branch of a tree a rope wherewith to hang himself,
the Chinese sage addressed him in words the gist of which was as
follows:
"However great your misfortunes, the greatest of all would be to yield
to despair. All the rest can be repaired; this one is irreparable. Do
not believe that all is lost for you and try to convince yourself of a
truth which has been proved indisputable by the experience of the
centuries. And that truth is this: so long as a man has life, there is
no need for him to despair. He may pass from the greatest misery to
the greatest joy, from the greatest misfortune to the highest
felicity. Take courage and, as though you were this very day beginning
to recognize the value of life, strive at every moment to make the
most of it."
This humdrum Chinese philosophy is not without merit. It suggests the
moralizing of the fabulist:
"_... Qu'on me rende impotent,
Cul-de-jatte, goutteux, manchot, pourvu qu'en somme
Je vive, c'est assez: je suis plus que content._"[2]
[Footnote 2: "... So powerless let me lie,
Gout-ridden, legless, armless; if only, after all,
I live, it is enough: more than content am I."]
Yes, yes, La Fontaine and Kung the philosopher are right: life is a
serious matter, which it will not do to throw away into the first bush
by the roadside like a useless garment. We must look upon it not as a
pleasure, nor yet as a punishment, but as a duty of which we have to
acquit ourselves as well as we can until we are given leave to depart.
To anticipate this leave is cowardly and foolish. The power to
disappear at will through death's trap-door does not justify us in
deserting our post; but it opens to us certain vistas which are
absolutely unknown to the animal.
We alone know how life's pageant closes, we alone can foresee our end,
we alone profess devotion to the dead. Of these high matters none
other has any suspicion. When would-be scientists proclaim aloud, when
they declare that a wretched insect knows the trick of simulating
death, we will ask them to look more closely and not to confound the
hypnosis due to terror with the pretence of a condition unknown to the
animal world.
Ours alone is the clear vision of an end, ours alone the glorious
instinct of the beyond. Here, filling its modest part, speaks the
voice of entomology, saying:
"Have confidence; never did an instinct fail to keep its promises."