276 SECRETS OF ANIMAL LIFE 



In stating a case for the blind marksman, whose 

 bow is bent in a direction to some degree determined 

 by the past, and therefore with a result that has an 

 illusory suggestion of foresight, we do not for a 

 moment under-appreciate the role of the seeing 

 artist, the explicit individual, with all its wits about 

 it, an instinctive or intelligent or rational agent 

 with no end of experimental power on a higher than 

 germinal level. But our thesis is to suggest that 

 especially in the lower reaches of life it is the blind 

 marksman who oftenest scores. The last point is 

 this, that, while we are probably wrong in trying 

 to justify the ways of the species to the individual, 

 it seems unlikely that an elaborate piece of in- 

 stinctive routine could retain its impervious inertia 

 through the ages unless a sop were offered to the 

 individual's interests and satisfactions. So, as 

 Goethe said, Nature gives a couple of draughts from 

 the tankard of love as recompense for the pains of 

 a lifetime, and in the case of animals that do not 

 survive to see the offspring towards whose welfare 

 they spend themselves, the parental instincts may 

 have become in some special way linked on to the 

 conjugal. In the latter the life of the creature is 

 stirred to its greatest depth and rises to its greatest 

 height. Perhaps the maternal sacrifice and the 

 strivings of the parents towards an unseen goal 

 may have a spice of individual significance in the 

 reverberations of conjugal experiences, and perhaps 

 even in ancestral reminiscences which these have 

 reawakened. Moreover, since repression may in- 



