"But what if the following contradiction were to assert itself? Suppose that the logical 'circle' is not a circle at all, but a spiral, so that the final point of the argument lies just a trifle above the initial point. I feel instinctively that such apparently fruitless circuitous arguments might finally lead to a definite piece of knowledge. For example, a certain insect, the ichneumon-fly, although devoid of a knowledge of science in our sense, infallibly plants its sting in a definite point in the rings of a caterpillar, at just the point that serves its purpose of paralysing the caterpillar without killing it. It acts instinctively, and it is open to me to interpret this occurrence in other words. The fly discloses that it 'knows' the anatomy of the foreign creature, although it has no conceptual knowledge of it in our sense. But it immediately follows from this analogy that, from the point of view of the fly, its _perceptual_ intelligence stands higher than our _conceptual_ intelligence--that is, by changing the perspective, I am led to declare the anatomical knowledge of the fly to be of higher rank than the analogous knowledge of the most learned anatomist. In the same way I might persuade myself that the mathematics of a bird of passage stands above the cartographic knowledge of any human explorer. The migratory bird that flies from the interior of Africa in a straight fine to its nest in Mecklenburg must have something in the nature of a co-ordinate system in its organism. The real reason that we assign a higher position to our conceptual knowledge is that we are equally proud of our intelligence as of our science; this is perhaps a deception depending on some compromise, a sort of illicit deal in which the mind draws bills of exchange on science, and, as a return, science meets its obligations by paying in cheques drawn on the mind!"