Test it with an accident and you affect it not at all: such as it is in the undisturbed exercise of its calling, such it will remain should circumstances arise demanding some modification in the conduct of its task. Experience does not teach it; time does not awaken a glimmer in the darkness of its unconsciousness. Its art, perfect in its speciality, but inept in the face of the slightest new difficulty, is handed down immutably, as the art of the suction-pump is handed down to the babe at the breast. To expect the insect to alter the essential points of its industry is to hope that the babe will change its manner of sucking. Both equally ignorant of what they are doing, they persevere in the method prescribed for the safeguarding of the species, precisely because their ignorance forbids them to make any sort of essay or attempt. The insect, then, lacks the aptitude for reflection, the aptitude that harks back and reverts to the antecedent, without which the consequent would lose all its value. In the phases of its industry, each action accomplished counts as valid by the mere fact that it has been accomplished; the insect does not go back to it, should some accident demand; the consequent follows without troubling about the missing antecedent. A blind impulse urges it from one act to a second, from this second to a third and so on until the task is completed; but it is impossible for the insect to reascend the current of its activity should accidental conditions arise and call for this, however imperatively. Having passed through the complete cycle, the work is considered to be most logically performed by a worker devoid of all logic. The stimulus to labour is the bait of pleasure, that chief motive-power in the animal. The mother has no foreknowledge whatever of her future larva; she does not build, does not hunt, does not hoard with the conscious aim of rearing a family. The real object of her work is hidden from her; the accessory but exciting aim, the pleasure experienced, is her only guide. The Pelopæus feels a keen satisfaction when she crams a cell full with Spiders; and she goes on hunting with imperturbable spirit after the removal of the egg from the cell has made provisions useless. She delights in plastering the outside of her nest with mud and she continues to putty the site of her nest, after it has been detached from the wall, without suspecting the futility of her stucco. And so with the others. To reproach them for their aberrations we must assume that they possess a tiny glimmer of reason, as Darwin [48] would have us believe; if they have it not, the reproach falls to the ground and their aberrant acts are the inevitable result of an unconsciousness diverted from its normal paths. CHAPTER VI THE SWALLOW AND THE SPARROW