842 president's address. 



its duty and none has any rights." [Has not the queen as much 

 right to her special appointments as any human monarch to the 

 regal accompaniments of his function 1 At any rate, if we cannot 

 here speak of a " right," as little can we talk of a "duty."] " 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 organisation of the hymen- 

 op terous type." Again, he says, "I see no reason for doubt that at 

 its origin human society was as much a product of organic necessity 

 as that of the bees." Then he points out that self-assertion in man is 

 a survival of the original " organic necessity" out of which human 

 polity arose, and that certain " organic necessities" operate as 

 checks upon this " self-assertion," as, for example, family affection, 

 sympathy, &c. "We come to think," he continues, "in the 

 acquired dialect of morals." " An artificial personality, ' the 

 man within,' as Adam Smith calls conscience, is built up beside 

 the natural personality. He is the watchman of society, &c., &c." 

 He then goes on : — "I have termed this evolution of the feelings out 

 of which the primitive bonds of human society are so largely forged, 

 into the organised and personified sympathy we call conscience, the 

 ' ethical process.' " But since Prof. Huxley has already taught us 

 to regard this as the natural offspring of the cosmic process arising 

 at the stage of organic necessity, whence comes the arbitrary 

 distinction between the one as " natural '' and the other as 

 " artificial *? " Surely, the identity of origin forbids us to pit the 

 one against the other as of alien growth ! The ethical, if recog- 

 nisable at all, is " cosmic " through and through, and it is vain to 

 talk as if they were each manifestations of distinct principles. 



In the treatment of bee polity, the explanation offered is that 

 it is "a product of an organic necessity impelling every member of 

 it to a course of action which tends to the good of the whole.'"* 

 Yet when a not dissimilar limitation of the struggle for existence 

 amongst the individuals comprising human society has to be 



* This is of course pure " cosmic " activity. 



