The Life of the Spider 



attentive silence which is dominant in the best 

 minds of the day. There are those who say : 



'Now that you have reaped a plentiful 

 harvest of details, you should follow up an- 

 alysis with synthesis and generalize the origin 

 of instinct in an all-embracing view.' 



To these he replies, with the humble and 

 magnificent loyalty that illumines all his 

 work: 



'Because I have stirred a few grains of sand 

 on the shore, am I in a position to know the 

 depths of the ocean? 



'Life has unfathomable secrets. Human 

 knowledge will be erased from the archives 

 of the world before we possess the last word 

 that the Gnat has to say to us. . . . 



'Success is for the loud talkers, the self- 

 convinced dogmatists; everything is admitted 

 on condition that it be noisily proclaimed. 

 Let us throw off this sham and recognize that, 

 in reality, we know nothing about anything, 

 if things were probed to the bottom. Scien- 

 tifically, Nature is a riddle without a definite 

 solution to satisfy man's curiosity. Hypoth- 

 esis follows on hypothesis; the theoretical 

 rubbish-heap accumulates; and truth ever 



34 



