PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



all this hard and complicated work, the beaver accepts 

 when pushed by necessity. He needs an artificial lake 

 with unvarying depth; if he finds one made by nature, 

 he accepts it, and limits himself to erecting his regular 

 huts. Thus osmies-, chalicodomes, or xylocopes, or men, 

 if they find by chance a nest prepared, hasten to profit 

 by it. The instinct of construction is by no means blind ; 

 it is a faculty which will not be employed very often 

 save in extremity: the present inhabitant of the Loire 

 valley still arranges the caves for domestic use. To its 

 injury, but of that it knows nothing, the bee profits 

 by the artificial combs slid into its hive. The Rhone 

 beaver has rested ever since men erected such excellent 

 dams there. The fairy palace which rises in mid forest 

 for the rubbing of a ring is the human, and animal, 

 ideal. 



I must close these observations on natural societies, 

 in pointing out that if they are today based on some- 

 thing quite different from polygamy, it seems likely 

 that they were in origin societies either of polygamy or 

 of sexual communism. If one starts from communism 

 one will very soon evolve either toward the couple, or 

 toward polygamy, if it is a matter of mammals; or toward 

 sexual neutralization if it is a matter of insects. The 

 couple, polygamy, neutralization are methods; sexual 

 communism is not a method, and for that reason one 

 must consider it as the chaos from which order has 

 little by little emerged. 



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