DARWIN AND BERGSON ON EVOLUTION 



with precision ; yet observers agree that the effect of that first 

 sting is instantaneous, and enables the wasp without difficulty to 

 disable its victim by further stings. 



In the next place, whatever be the minute anatomical accuracy 

 of the Ammophila's instincts, Bergson's hypothetical interpretation, 

 although attractive and poetic, is very unconvincing, and could 

 hardly have been propounded by the distinguished author if he had 

 studied insects as a whole. According to Bergson, the instinctive 

 actions of the Ammophila are the outcome of " sympathy," of its 

 intimate closeness to life, and especially to the life of its victim. 



" We suppose a sympathy (in the etymological sense of the word) 

 between the Ammophila and its victim, which teaches it from 

 within, so to say, concerning the vulnerability of the caterpillar. 

 This feeling of vulnerability might owe nothing to outward per- 

 ception, but result from the mere presence together of the Ammo- 

 phila and the caterpillar, considered no longer as two organisms, 

 but as two activities." * 



A wider consideration of the work of Fabre, the great naturalist 

 on whom Bergson has relied, would have shown how improbable is 

 such an interpretation. Thus Fabre has observed that Bembex — 

 another Fossorial wasp, which does not store up food for the future, 

 but feeds its larvse from time to time with flies — is impelled to carry 

 on its maternal duties by no inherent " sympathy " with its young, 

 but in blind obedience to a stimulus in which the mouth of its 

 burrow plays an essential part. For when Fabre dug the burrow 

 away so that the larvse of the Bembex were exposed to view, the 

 mother was utterly puzzled and ceased to feed them. Her children 

 were nothing to her when the front door was removed and the roof 

 had been carried away ! Even in birds the maternal instinct seems 

 to be a blind impulse with nothing of the quality assumed by 

 Bergson ; and only because it is blind and mechanical has the evolu- 

 tion of the instinct of the cuckoo been rendered possible. Speaking 

 of the neglect by a robin of her nestling turned out by a young 

 cuckoo, F. B. Kirkman writes : — 



" It seems that if her nestlings are not where the mother 

 expects them to be — in the nest — then for her they cease to exist. 

 I have myself . . . placed a callow willow-wren on the ground an 

 inch or two from the entrance of its nest, and though it wriggled 



* Creative Evolution, p. 183, London, 1911. 

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