132 ANIMAL ARTISANS 



non-existent for us. At the same time they have a 

 different quality of sight, which, if transferred to us, 

 would make us unable to find the Nelson Column in 

 Trafalgar Square. 



The result of the gap between the mind of the 

 man who observes and the mind of the insect whose 

 activities he watches has always tended to produce 

 one of two contradictory forms of interpretation. 



The first was to assume that, because social bees 

 or ants were engaged in exactly the same activities 

 as human communities, their minds were practically 

 the same as our own ; that, in fact, there was some- 

 thing equivalent to human intelligence of a very high 

 order, with necessarily corresponding moral qualities, 

 in the bee ; and that for the purposes of this life there 

 was, in fact, a tiny " soul " in each working member 

 of the hive. That soul, if the conclusions of the 

 early naturalists are examined, was clearly a human 

 intelligence metamorphosed. This assumption would 

 explain quite logically the astonishing and incredible 

 perfection of the material side of the life of social 

 insects. It also accounted for the apparently moral 

 ideas of subordination, self-sacrifice, and devotion to 

 duty which their life exhibits. The difficulty in its 

 acceptance was the limitation of this intelligence to a 

 narrow class of actions, outside which this astonishingly 

 brilliant intellect ceased to work at all; and the absence 

 of any evidence beyond that set of acts to show the 

 processes of thought. 



This absence of evidence of any thought origi- 

 nating and directing the work of social insects led 



