It is because the bees and the other dumb creatures have nothing more than this measure of reason which we call instinct, that it serves them perfectly. Man has something else, that draws him higher; that prompts him further. But alas for us! With the destiny to live perfectly as human beings, we yet long for the restrictions through which we may live perfectly as the beasts. We seek our lessons from the brutes while the Eternal waits to teach us. We cannot live like the beasts. The divine human spark within us will not let us. We must live higher than they or we shall live lower, for our perfection of order is infinitely higher than theirs, and our failure immeasurably lower than they can sink ❧ But we go on, we modern Athenians, seeking to ameliorate the conditions we have brought upon society by our own stupid disobedience and inhumanity, and only now and then do we have a faint suspicion that our newest thoughts are but mere rephrasings of ideas old as thought itself ❧ Men get these new sets of phrases and dress therein the ideas that underlie the universe. We apply the terms of science to the old faiths and think we have invented a new religion. We find new names for God Himself, and believe ourselves to have discovered a new life-principle ☙ Loving the neighbor becomes enlightened altruism, and lo, faith is born anew, with a subtiler power to redeem the world. [Illustration] Hercules is a Socialist. He always spells society with a great S, and he declares in the present state of Society we can take no thought for individuals ☘ “The individual may perish,” he says, in moments of eloquence, “but the integrity of Society must be jealously maintained.” ☙ I wonder, as I sit here watching the bees, whether Society might not, after all, find easement from its ails if each individual of us, myself and Hercules included, should pay strict attention to our individual business of growing, or becoming humanized? ✪ Just here at my hand a bee has alighted and is burying its nose in a clover blossom. Here is an example of a life that is lived only for Society, yet so important is the individual in the opinion of this highly perfected body social, that I have seen half a dozen bees, when a laden worker has arrived at the hive opening, weighted down, too exhausted to do other than drop, helpless, upon the threshold, rush to its assistance, relieve it of its heavy load and help it to pass within to gather strength for further effort. The strict individualist complains, in turn, of the bees because they have no individual life; no existence separate from the hive. This is true, but what higher individuality can any creature desire than is comprised and summed up in the divine opportunity to bring his individual gift to the common store?