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.* 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. 



* Collected Essays, vol. i., "Animal Automatism"; 

 vol. v., " Prologue," pp. 45 et seq. 



