What, then, questions the persevering pursuer of the final verities, shall we do in order that we may press nearer to Truth? May we not perchance steep our souls in light that flows from another source than science? And what purer light is there to illumine us than the halo surrounding a contented worker performing his task, not under coercion, but from a voluntary, or it may be instinctive, submission to the law of life? If such subordination of self constitutes the basis of rational living, we shall do well to study its workings on a lowlier and less complicated plane than the human; for instance, in the behavior of the creature that is proverbial for its unflagging industry. For this industry is not motivated by immediate or selfish wants; it springs from instinctive self-dedication to the common cause. Some people expected from _La Vie des Abeilles_ ("The Life of the Bee"), (1901), much brand-new information about matters of apiculture. But in spite of his twenty-five years' experience, Maeterlinck had no startling discoveries to convey to his fellow-hivers. His book on bees is not primarily the result of a specialist's investigations but a poetical record of the observations made by a mind at once romantic and philosophical and strongly attracted to the study of this particular form of community life, because by its organization on a miniature scale it spreads before the student of society a synoptic view of human affairs. Of the great change that had by now taken place in his conception of life, Maeterlinck was fully cognizant, and made no concealment of it. In the essay on "Justice" he says, with reference to his earlier dramas: "The motive of these little plays was the fear of the Unknown by which we are constantly surrounded," and passes on to describe his religious temper as a sort of compound of the Christian idea of God with the antique idea of Fate, immersed in the profound gloom of hopeless mystery. "The Unknown took chiefly the aspect of a power, itself but blindly groping in the dark, yet disposing with inexorable unfeelingness of the fates of men."