226 THE LIFE OF THE BEE 



to life ; but should a creature succeed in maintaining its 

 little, profound, and complicated existence without over- 

 stepping the boundaries of instinct, without doing anything 

 but what is ordinary, that would be very interesting too, 

 and very extraordinary. Restore the ordinary and the marvel- 

 lous to their veritable place in the bosom of nature, and 

 their values shift : one equals the other. We find that their 

 names are usurped ; and that it is not they, but the things 

 we cannot understand or explain that should arrest our 

 attention, refresh our activity, and give a new, and juster, 

 form to our thoughts and feelings and words. There is 

 wisdom in attaching oneself to nought beside. 



114 



And further, our intellect is not the proper tribunal before 

 which to summon the bees, and pass their faults in review. Do 

 we not find, among ourselves, that consciousness and intellect 

 long will dwell in the midst of errors and faults without per- 

 ceiving them, longer still without effecting a remedy ? If a 

 being exist whom his destiny calls most specially, almost organi- 

 cally, to live and to organise common life in accordance with 

 pure reason, that being is man. And yet see what he makes 

 of it ; compare the mistakes of the hive with those of our own 

 society. How should we marvel, for instance, were we bees 

 observing men, as we noted the unjust, illogical distribution of 

 work among a race of creatures that in other directions appear 

 to manifest eminent reason ! We should find the earth's surface, 

 unique source of all common life, insufficiently, painfully culti- 

 vated by two or three tenths of the whole population ; we 



