interrupted? Espinas then goes on to describe animal societies of many types, and shows how, as we follow up the evolutionary scale, association and intimate interdependence and co-operation of their members tend to replace more and more completely the individualistic antagonism and unmitigated competition of the lowest free-living organisms. He considers first the type of animal society which is essentially a family, a society of individuals all of which are derived from the same parent by fission or by budding. He argues that each such society of blood-relatives is a harmonious whole only because it enjoys a ‘collective consciousness’ over and above the consciousnesses of its constituent members; that, for example, a swarm of bees, which exhibits so great a uniformity of feeling and action and of which all the members come from the body of one parent, is in reality the material basis of a ‘collective consciousness,’ which presides over and is expressed by their collective actions; that the ants of one household have such a collective consciousness, that they “are, in truth, a single thought in action, like the various cellules and fibres of the brain of a mammal.” For, as he maintains, “the consciousness of animals is not an absolute, indivisible thing. It is on the contrary a reality capable of being divided and diffused ... thought in general and the impulses illuminated by it, are, like the forces of nature, susceptible of diffusion, of transmission, of being shared, and can like these lie dormant where they are thinly diffused, or become vivid and intensified by concentration. The beings that have these attributes are no doubt monads; but these monads are open to and communicate with one another.”