2IO THE LIFE OF THE BEE 



arguments, which yet do not carry irresistible conviction. 

 We must beware of abandoning ourselves unreservedly to 

 the prevailing truths of our time. A hundred years hence, 

 many chapters of a book instinct to-day with this truth, will 

 appear as ancient as the philosophical writings of the eighteenth 

 century seem to us now, full as they are of a too-perfect and 

 non-existing man, or as so many works of the seventeenth 

 century, whose value is lessened by their conception of a harsh 

 and narrow god. 



Nevertheless, when it is impossible to know what the 

 truth of a thing may be, it is well to accept the hypothesis 

 that appeals the most urgently to the reason of men at the 

 period when we happen to have come into the world. The 

 chances are that it will be false ; but so long as we believe 

 it to be true it will serve a useful purpose by restoring our 

 courage and stimulating research in a new direction. It might 

 at the first glance seem wiser, perhaps, instead of advancing 

 these ingenious suppositions, simply to say the profound truth, 

 which is that we do not know. But this truth could be 

 helpful only were it written that we never shall know. In 

 the meanwhile it would induce a state of stagnation within 

 us more pernicious than the most vexatious illusions. We 

 are so constituted that nothing takes us further or leads us 

 higher than the leaps made by our errors. In point of fact, 

 we owe the little we have learned to hypotheses that were 

 always hazardous and often absurd, and, as a general rule, 

 less discreet than they are to-day. They were unwise, perhaps, 

 but they kept alive the ardour for research. To the traveller, 

 shivering with cold, who reaches the human Hostelry, it 

 matters little whether he by whose side he seats himself, he 



