' The Life of the Bee 
creature succeed in maintaining its little, 
profound, and complicated existence without 
overstepping the boundaries of instinct, 
without doing anything but what is ordi- 
nary, that would be very interesting too, and 
very extraordinary. Restore the ordinary 
and the marvellous 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. 
113 
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 con- 
sciousness and intellect long will dwell in 
the midst of errors and faults without per- 
ceiving them, longer still without effecting 
336 
