THE CYCLE OF LIFE 433 



done is often very far from advantageous to the individual. 

 It is advantageous, indeed essential, for the species, but 

 it is exhausting, sometimes fatal, to the single hfe. As 

 Groethe said, Nature ' cares nothing for individuals '. 



Animals do not indeed foresee that their reproduction 

 is going to be fatal to them ; the instinctive mother-insect 

 does not know that she will never see her ofEspring emerge 

 from the eggs around which she places a store of laboriously 

 collected food ; we have no reason to believe that she has 

 any picture of offspring ; when animals are fatigued, 

 as their brain-ceUs show them to be, they probably suffer 

 no weariness, and they are doubtless unquestioning ; they 

 are borne on by impulses and instincts which are as com- 

 pelhng as hunger and thirst. But the point is that these 

 strong instincts bear them to expenditures of energy which 

 are not self-preservative, but objectively other-regarding. 

 In some cases, it is true, there is the reward of reproductive 

 gratification, and Emerson was, we beUeve, profoundly 

 right when he suggested that the imperiousness of sex 

 desire was necessary in order to make organisms (especially 

 the higher animals) face reproduction. But the reward 

 of sex-gratification only apphes to a limited set of cases, 

 and even for it many animals have to pay heavily. As 

 Goethe said : ' She holds a couple of draughts from the cup 

 of love to be fair payment for the pains of a hfetime '. 

 We are brought, then, to face the great fact of Organic 

 Nature, that those forms of life tend to survive in which 

 the individual has been more or less subordinated to the 

 welfare of the species. Metaphorically, that is part of 

 Nature's strategy. Literally, the prolific species-preserving 

 types have survived. 



Reproduction is physiologically expensive. The sturgeon, 



FF 



