If we could suppose her to be conscious in the human sense, we must imagine the bee to be possessed by an enthusiasm for the hive more intense than a mother’s devotion to her son, without personal ambitions, or doubts or fears, and if we are to judge by the imperfect experience man has yet had of the same lofty passion, we must think of her consciousness, insignificant spark as it is, as a little fire ablaze with altruistic feeling. Doubtless, such {107} an attribution of emotion to the bee is a quite unjustified fallacy of anthropomorphism. Nevertheless, it is not altogether valueless as a hint of what social unity might effect in an animal of larger mental life. There can be little doubt that the perfection to which the communal life of the bee has attained is dependent on the very smallness of the mental development of which the individuals are capable. Their capacity to assimilate experience is necessarily from their structure, and is known by experience to be, small and their path is marked out so plainly by actual physical modifications that the almost miraculous absorption of the worker in the hive is after all perhaps natural enough. If she were able to assimilate general experience on a larger scale, to react freely and appropriately to stimuli external to the hive, there can be little doubt that the community would show a less concentrated efficiency than it does to-day. The standing miracle of the bee—her sensitiveness to the voice of the hive and her capacity to communicate with her fellows—would undoubtedly be less marvellously perfect if she were not at the same time deaf to all other voices.