PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



at once, and infant in swaddling clothes. Moralists love 

 bees from whom they distil examples and aphorisms. 

 They recommend us work, order, economy, foresight, 

 obedience and divers virtues other. Abandon yourself 

 boldly to labour: Nature wills it. Nature wills every- 

 thing. She is complacent to all the activities; to our 

 imaginings there is no analogy that she will refuse, not 

 one. She desires the social constructions of bees; she 

 desires also the Life All Love of the "Great Peacock," 

 of the osmie, of the sitaris. She desires that the forms 

 she has created shall continue indefinitely, and to this 

 end all means are, to her, good. ' ..t if she presents us 

 the laborious example of the bee, she does not hide from 

 us the polyandrous example, nor the cruel amours of 

 the mantis. There is not in the will to live the faintest 

 trace of our poor little human morality. If one wishes 

 an unique sole morality, that is to say an universal com- 

 mandment, which all species may listen to, which they 

 can follow in spirit and in letter, if one wishes in short 

 to know the "aim of life" and the duty of the living, 

 it is necessary, evidently, to find a formula which will 

 totalize all the contradictions, break them and fuse them 

 into a sole affirmation. There is but one, we may repeat 

 it, without fear, and without allowing any objection: the 

 aim of life is life's continuation. 



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