THE NATURAL 



means used to attain this fact should in no way be 

 integrated in the finality itself. None of the procedures 

 of generation, for example, bears the mark of necessity. 

 It is not the ferocity of the she-spider which demands the 

 sexual habit; the female mantis is still more savage, 

 and mantis' method is cavalage. It does not seem as 

 if anything in nature were ordered in view of some 

 benefit; causes blindly engender causes; some maintain 

 life, others force it to progress, others destroy it; we 

 qualify them differently, according to the dictates of our 

 sensibility, but they are non-qualifiable; they are move- 

 ments, and nothing else. The pebble ricochets on the 

 water, or it doesn't; this has no importance in itself, 

 nothing more will come of it and nothing less. It is an 

 image of supreme finality: after eight or ten bounds, 

 life, like the pebble thrown by a child, will fall into the 

 abyss, and with it all the good and evil, all facts, all 

 ideas, and all things. 



The idea of finality leads one back to the idea of fact, 

 one is no longer tempted to attempt an explanation of 

 nature. One would try modestly to reconstruct the chain 

 of causes and, as a great number of rings will always be 

 lacking, and as the absence of one ring alone would suf- 

 fice to unhook the whole reasoning, one will do this in a 

 piety tempered by scepticism. 



The epirus, although a spider, is not an ill-conditioned 

 beast; she is episcopal, she carries on her back a pretty 

 white cross upside down. The large ones are the fe- 

 males; the very small ones, the males. Both hook their 

 webs upon bushes, on shrubs, live without knowing each 

 other until instinct has spoken. A day comes when the 

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