The Life of the Bee 
all that would tend to lessen it remaining 
there in suspense, like insoluble salts that 
change not till the hour for decisive expe- 
riment. He may accept an inferior truth, 
but before he will act in accordance there- 
with he will wait, if need be for centuries, 
until he perceive the connection this truth 
must possess with truths so infinite as to 
include and surpass all others. 
In a word, he divides the moral from the 
intellectual order, admitting in the former 
that only which is greater and more beautiful 
than was there before. And blameworthy 
as it may be to separate the two orders in 
cases, only too frequent in life, where we 
suffer our conduct to be inferior to our 
thoughts, where, seeing the good, we follow 
the worse; to see the worse and follow the 
better, to raise our actions high over our 
idea, must ever be reasonable and salutary; 
for human experience renders it daily more 
clear that the highest thought we can attain 
will long be inferior still to the mysterious 
truth we seek. Moreover, should nothing 
of what goes before be true, a reason more 
simple and more familiar would counsel him 
256 
