I PROLEGOMENA 25 



has any rights. Whether bees are susceptible 

 of feeling and capable of thought is a question 

 which cannot be dogmatically answered. As a 

 pious opinion, I am disposed to deny them more 

 than the merest rudiments of consciousness. 1 But 

 it is curious to reflect that a thoughtful drone 

 (workers and queens would have no leisure for 

 speculation) with a turn for ethical philosophy, 

 must needs profess himself an intuitive moralist 

 of the purest water. He would point out, with 

 perfect justice, that the devotion of the workers to 

 a life of ceaseless toil for a mere subsistence 

 wage, cannot be accounted for either by enlight 

 ened selfishness, or by any other sort of utilitarian 

 motives ; since these bees begin to work, without 

 experience or reflection, as they emerge from the 

 cell in which they are hatched. Plainly, an eter 

 nal and immutable principle, innate in each bee, 

 can alone account for the phenomena. On the 

 other hand, the biologist, who traces out all the 

 extant stages of gradation between solitary and 

 hive bees, as clearly sees in the latter, simply the 

 perfection of an automatic mechanism, hammered 

 out by the blows of the struggle for existence 

 upon the progeny of the former, during long ages 

 of constant variation. 



1 Collected Essays, vol. i., "Animal Automatism"; vol. v., 

 "Prologue," pp. 45 et seq. 



