PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE 



choice, it must contain certain indispensable elements: 

 a necessity identical with that which rules the animals, 

 and even the plants whose roots reach down toward the 

 desired juice, and whose branches reach toward the light. 

 Song, dance, strife, and, for the group, war; human 

 instincts are not unknown to all animals. The taste for 

 brilliant things, another human instinct is frequent enough 

 in birds; it is true that birds have not yet made anything 

 of it, and that man has evolved the sumptuary arts. 

 There remains love, but I think this supreme instinct is 

 the consecrated limit of the objections. 



Useful acts habitually repeated may become invincible, 

 like veritable instinctive movements. A hunter x spend- 

 ing the winter in an isolated cabin in Canada engaged an 

 Indian woman to keep house for him. She arrives in the 

 evening, melts the snow, begins to wash up, shifts every- 

 thing, prevents his getting any sleep. He rages. Si- 

 lence. As soon as he is asleep, the woman mechanically 

 begins to work again, and so on, until the humble Indian 

 gets the last word. Here, exactly as among insects, one 

 has the example of work which once begun must go on 

 until it is finished. The insect can not be interrupted; 

 if it is interrupted by external cause it starts work again 

 not at the point where it actually finds the work, but at 

 the point where it, the insect, left off. Thus, one entirely 

 removed the nest which a chalicodome was building on a 

 shingle; the bee returns, finds nothing, since there is 

 nothing to find, but instead of recommencing the building, 

 continues it. There was nothing to be done but close the 

 hole; the bee closes it, that is to say she deposits the last 



1 Vide Milton and Cheaddle, works already cited. 

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