“With the originality of genius he is from the first totally opposed to the point of view of those naturalists who are fascinated by morphology and anatomy.” [156] He believes that the characteristics of life are to be found in life itself, and that if we wish truly to know the insect, nothing will help us so much as seeing it at work. “Mere common sense, the reader will say, yet it is by no means common”; and it usually happens that writers “forget to take performance into their reckoning when they are describing life.” [157] To study living entomology, that is, to study the insect living its life and in the highest manifestations of its life, in its instincts and its habits, in its aptitudes and its passions, in a word, in its psychic faculties; to replace the dominant standpoint of morphology and physiology by the standpoint of biology and psychology; such is the essential programme of the writer of the Souvenirs. And he adheres to it all the more strictly the more he sees it neglected by those about him, judging it to be of still greater importance for one who is seeking to know the insect, more advantageous to practice and speculation, more essential to the open-air life and the most abstruse inquiries of the human mind. By curiously interrogating the life of the insects one may render inestimable services to agriculture, as Pasteur did in his investigation of sericulture; one may also “furnish general psychology with data of inestimable value,” and this in particular was what he proposed to do. M. Fabre’s restless mind is for ever haunted by the most abstruse problems, which, indicated here and there, enable us to understand the motives that urge him on. With reference to these the insect is no longer an end: it becomes a means. Above all, M. Fabre wishes to define instinct; to establish the line of demarcation which divides it from intelligence, and to demonstrate whether human reason is an irreducible faculty or whether it is only a degree higher on a scale whose base descends into the depths of animality. More generally he propounds the question of the identity or the difference between the animal mind and the human. He also seeks to examine the problem of evolution; finally, to discover whether geometry rules over all things, and whether it tells us of a Universal Geometer, or whether “the strictly beautiful, the domain of reason, that is, order, is the inevitable result of a blind mechanism.” [158] And to tell the whole story in a few words, the essential object, the general impulse of this curious and powerful mind, which refuses to divide science from philosophy, is to consider the insect, how it lives; to note its actions and its movements; to reach its inner from its outer life; its inward impulse from its external action; and then to climb upwards from the insect to man and from man to God.