I have other reasons for fearing that this logical ideal of
evolutionary regimentation--this pigeon-fanciers' polity--is
unattainable. In the absence of any such a severely scientific
administrator as we have been dreaming of, human society [24] is kept
together by bonds of such a singular character, that the attempt to
perfect society after his fashion would run serious risk of loosening
them. Social organization is not peculiar to men. Other societies,
such as those constituted by bees and ants, have also arisen out of
the advantage of co-operation in the struggle for existence; and their
resemblances to, and their differences from, human society are alike
instructive. The society formed by the hive bee fulfils the ideal of
the communistic aphorism "to each according to his needs, from each
according to his capacity." Within it, the struggle for existence is
strictly limited. Queen, drones, and workers have each their allotted
sufficiency of food; each performs the function assigned to it in the
economy of the hive, and all contribute to the success of the whole
cooperative society in its competition with rival collectors of nectar
and pollen and with other enemies, in the state of nature without. In
the same sense as the garden, or the colony, is a work of human art,
the bee polity is a work of apiarian art, brought about by the cosmic
process, working through the organization of the hymenopterous type.
Now this society is the direct product of an organic necessity,
impelling every member of it to a course of action which tends to the
good of the whole. Each bee has its duty and none [25] has any rights.
Whether bees are susceptible of feeling and capable of thought is a
question which cannot be dogmatically answered. As a pious opinion, I
am disposed to deny them more than the merest rudiments of
consciousness.* But it is curious to reflect that a thoughtful drone
(workers and queens would have no leisure for speculation) with a turn
for ethical philosophy, must needs profess himself an intuitive
moralist of the purest water. He would point out, with perfect
justice, that the devotion of the workers to a life of ceaseless toil
for a mere subsistence wage, cannot be accounted for either by
enlightened selfishness, or by any other sort of utilitarian motives;
since these bees begin to work, without experience or reflection, as
they emerge from the cell in which they are hatched. Plainly, an
eternal and immutable principle, innate in each bee, can alone account
for the phenomena. On the other hand, the biologist, who traces out
all the extant stages of gradation between solitary and hive bees, as
clearly sees in the latter, simply the perfection of an automatic
mechanism, hammered out by the blows of the struggle for existence
upon the progeny of the former, during long ages of constant
variation.
* Collected Essays, vol. i., "Animal Automatism"; vol. v.,
"Prologue," pp. 45 et seq.
[26]