9 
7 
- 
oe 
81 
thence draw for themselves genuine slaves; nay afterwards, even 
these slaves, denying all the ties of nature, prefer even the advantage 
of their cruel lords to that of their own race, and are the very first 
in their robber-raids to help to carry off new flocks of slaves. 
Although these highly interesting facts of the intellectual life of the 
ants were discovered more than a hundred years ago by Huber 
and other entomologists, they were nevertheless held for a long 
time to be mere fabulous products of fancy, and the numerous 
investigations of modern time, whilst adding further new dis- 
coveries, have first fully established them. 
In truth, the intellectual contrasts between the clever ants and 
their stupid milch-kine, the aphides, are greater than the tremendous 
difference between the god-like genius of a Goethe or a Shakspeare 
and the poor animal-soul of a Hottentot ora Bushman. And yet 
in the one case, as in the other, there exists between the extreme 
ends a long row of intermediate degrees. All have still a common 
original source. As most men consider our race to be derived 
from a common father of all men, so-almost all zoologists are 
agreed that all those various groups of insects are derived from a 
common insect-stem. Consequently, the most widely differing 
soul-activities of these must have been gradually developed by 
means of adaptation to the differing life-circumstances, and then, 
by continued inheritances, have become turned into the so-called 
instincts, 
No idea has called forth so many errors and misunderstandings 
in comparative physiology, as what is called zvstinct. Thus while 
the older natural history made all individual kinds of animals 
with their special peculiarities to come into existence by a super- 
natural act of creation, it was obliged at the same time to assume 
that the specific soul-activity also of such a class had been 
created, and thus by this necessity every step in life of the 
animal was definitely determined from beforehand. The whole 
of the impulses which accordingly were necessarily bound to deter- 
mine without possibility of variation the modes of action of the 
kinds of animals, and among which the most note-worthy are the 
so called art-impulses of the nest-building birds, bees, &c., were 
6 
