As a pious opinion, I
am disposed to deny them more than the merest rudiments of
consciousness.* But it is curious to reflect that a thoughtful drone
(workers and queens would have no leisure for speculation) with a turn
for ethical philosophy, must needs profess himself an intuitive
moralist of the purest water. He would point out, with perfect
justice, that the devotion of the workers to a life of ceaseless toil
for a mere subsistence wage, cannot be accounted for either by
enlightened selfishness, or by any other sort of utilitarian motives;
since these bees begin to work, without experience or reflection, as
they emerge from the cell in which they are hatched. Plainly, an
eternal and immutable principle, innate in each bee, can alone account
for the phenomena. On the other hand, the biologist, who traces out
all the extant stages of gradation between solitary and hive bees, as
clearly sees in the latter, simply the perfection of an automatic
mechanism, hammered out by the blows of the struggle for existence
upon the progeny of the former, during long ages of constant
variation.
* Collected Essays, vol. i., "Animal Automatism"; vol. v.,
"Prologue," pp. 45 et seq.
[26]
X.
I see no reason to doubt that, at its origin, human society was as much
a product of organic necessity as that of the bees.
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