276 SECRETS OF ANIMAL LIFE 
In stating a case for the blind marksman, whose 
bow is bent in a direction to some degree determined 
by the past, and therefore with a result that has an 
illusory suggestion of foresight, we do not for a 
moment under-appreciate the rdle of the seeing 
artist, the explicit individual, with all its wits about 
it, an instinctive or intelligent or rational agent 
with no end of experimental power on a higher than 
germinal level. But our thesis is to suggest that 
especially in the lower reaches of life it is the blind 
marksman who oftenest scores. The last point is 
this, that, while we are probably wrong in trying 
to justify the ways of the species to the individual, 
it seems unlikely that an elaborate piece of in- 
stinctive routine could retain its impervious inertia 
through the ages unless a sop were offered to the 
individual’s interests and satisfactions. So, as 
Goethe said, Nature gives a couple of draughts from 
the tankard of love as recompense for the pains of 
a lifetime, and in the case of animals that do not 
survive to see the offspring towards whose welfare 
they spend themselves, the parental instincts may 
have become in some special way linked on to the 
conjugal. In the latter the life of the creature is 
stirred to its greatest depth and rises to its greatest 
height. Perhaps the maternal sacrifice and the 
strivings of the parents towards an unseen goal 
may have a spice of individual significance in the 
reverberations of conjugal experiences, and perhaps 
even in ancestral reminiscences which these have 
reawakened. Moreover, since repression may in- 
