And similarly, it is surely disingenuous on our part to exalt as a moral emblem the instinct of ant and bee to subordinate the life of the individual to the general--if we deny to ant and bee the immortality by which alone such altruism can be recompensed; or if we are to believe that a clearer knowledge of their future lot would cause them in logic and reason to declare that life on those terms was not worth living, and that “to eat, drink, and die to-morrow” were better than to live longer and labour for a vain repetition of lives like their own indefinitely multiplied. It is ridiculous to impose the moral emblem unless you grant also the justifying conditions. Because the bee and the ant live unconscious of their impending doom, are we, therefore, to regard them as a hoodwinked race, set to labour at the dictates of the Creative capitalist on terms which contain in them no adequate reward? Suppose, for a moment, that revelation could descend upon ants’ nest and hive, and tell these workers that beyond death the future held for them no store--that their immortality was the immortality not of individual but of race; and suppose that thereupon they all struck and went forth to die each singly in their own way--would that moral emblem impress us, do you think, as a thing worthy of imitation or of praise? But why (let us think) is the predication of such an event so impossible and so grotesque? Is it not because the life, the individual life of ant or bee is so impregnated with that instinct of communalism which gives the species its distinctive character, that it is impossible to sunder them, or to imagine the individual capable (while in the social _milieu_) of pursuing individual ends alone, after a following, over millions of years, of life in the communal form. Life, the thread of life which runs through them, is too much engrained with communism for separatist principles ever again to prevail. And surely it is the same with man. Individualism, separatism, self-obsessionism, though still present in the phenomena of existence, are more and more subject to qualifications from which they cannot escape. And even the most evil form of individualism has to be parasitic or predatory; it cannot exist alone; even against its will it becomes conditioned by other lives. And the communal sense of man, implicit within the innumerable forms of life through which he has evolved, will continue to lay its hold on the parasitic and the predatory, and will do so quite effectively on the basis of an evolutionary past, the tendencies of which were established before ever theological definitions came to give them impulse and strength.