TIME AND CHANGE 
in a maple tree, saw him flit from branch to branch 
for a few moments, and then launch out and fly 
toward a distant wood. But he left an impression 
with me that I should be sorry to have missed. 
Nature stimulates our esthetic and our intellect- 
ual life and to a certain extent our religious emo- 
tions, but I fear we cannot find much support for 
our ethical system in the ways of wild Nature. I 
know our artist naturalist, Ernest Thompson Seton, 
claims to find what we may call the biological value 
of the Ten Commandments in the lives of the wild 
animals; but I cannot make his reasoning hold 
water, at least not much of it. Of course the Ten 
Commandments are not arbitrary laws. They are 
largely founded upon the needs of the social or- 
ganism; but whether they have the same foundation 
in the needs of animal life apart from man, apart 
from the world of moral obligation, is another ques- 
tion. The animals are neither moral nor immoral: 
they are unmoral; their needs are all physical. It is 
true that the command against murder is pretty well 
kept by the higher animals. They rarely kill their own 
kind: hawks do not prey upon hawks, nor foxes prey 
upon foxes, nor weasels upon weasels; but lower down 
this does not hold. Trout eat trout, and pickerel eat 
pickerel, and among the insects young spiders eat 
one another, and the female spider eats her mate, 
if she can get him. There is but little, if any, neigh- 
borly love among even the higher animals. They 
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