TIME AND CHANGE 



in a maple tree, saw him flit from branch to branch 

 for a few moments, and then launch out and fly 

 toward a distant wood. But he left an impression 

 with me that I should be sorry to have missed. 



Nature stimulates our sesthetic and our intellect- 

 ual life and to a certain extent our religious emo- 

 tions, but I fear we cannot find much support for 

 our ethical system in the wa^^'s of wild Nature. I 

 know our artist naturalist, Ernest Thompson Seton, 

 claims to find what we may call the biological value 

 of the Ten Commandments in the lives of the wild 

 animals; but I cannot make his reasoning hold 

 water, at least not much of it. Of course the Ten 

 Commandments are not arbitrary laws. They are 

 largely founded upon the needs of the social or- 

 ganism; but whether they have the same foundation 

 in the needs of animal life apart from man, apart 

 from the world of moral obligation, is another ques- 

 tion. The animals are neither moral nor immoral: 

 they are unmoral; their needs are all physical. It is 

 true that the command against murder is pretty well 

 kept by the higher animals. They rarely kill their own 

 kind : hawks do not prey upon hawks, nor foxes prey 

 upon foxes, nor weasels upon weasels ; but lower down 

 this does not hold. Trout eat trout, and pickerel eat 

 pickerel, and among the insects young spiders eat 

 one another, and the female spider eats her mate, 

 if she can get him. There is but little, if any, neigh- 

 borly love among even the higher animals. They 



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