THE ANT-COLONY AS AN ORGANISM 323 
always; and the thrice-happy city is Scattered abroad in obedience to a 
law superior to its own happiness. Where has this law been decreed 
which, as we soon shall find, is by no means as blind and inevitable as 
one might believe? Where, in what assembly, what council, what in- 
tellectual amd moral sphere, does this spirit reside to whom all must 
submit, itself being vassal to an heroic duty, to an intelligence whose eyes 
are persistently fixed on the future? 
It comes to pass with the bees as with most of the things in this world; 
we remark some few of their habits; we say they do this, they work in 
such and such fashion, their queens are born thus, their workers are 
virgin, they swarm at a certain time. And then we imagine we know 
them, and ask nothing more. We watch them hasten from flower to 
flower, we see the constant agitation within the hive; their life seems very 
simple to us, and bounded, like every life, by the instinctive cares of 
reproduction and nourishment. But let the eye draw near, and endeay- 
our to see; and at once the least phenomenon of all becomes overpower- 
ingly complex; we are confronted by the enigma of intellect, of destiny, 
will, aim, means, causes; the incomprehensible organization of the most 
insignificant act of life. 
Other authors like Driesch, give the postulated controlling 
agency the sharper outlines of a would-be scientific but in reality 
metaphysical entity and call it the ‘entelechy.’ It is true that 
the entelechy is deduced by Driesch from the autonomic peculiari- 
ties of the personal organism, but as the colony has all the essen- 
tial attributes of the organism, he would undoubtedly assign it an 
entelechy, which according to the definition would have to be 
nonspacial, but working into space, nonspsychic, but conceivable 
only after analogy with the psychic, and non-energetic, but never- 
theless capable of determining the specificity of the colonial 
activities through releasing and distributing energy. 
I confess that I find the entelechy quite as useless an aid in 
unravelling the complex activities of the ant-colony as others have 
found it in analyzing the personal organism. This angel-child, 
entelechy, comes, to be sure, of most distinguished antecedents, 
having been mothered by the Platonic idea, fathered by the Kant- 
ian Ding-an-sich, suckled at the breast of the scholastic forma 
substantialis and christened, from a strong family likeness, after 
old Aristotle’s darling evredéxeca, but nevertheless, I believe that 
