pardonable faults of young people is eating, drinking, or sleeping too much.  But in our imaginary world to eat or to drink or to sleep in even the least degree more than is necessary could not be done; the constitution of the race would not permit it.  One more illustration.  Our children have to be educated carefully in regard to what is right or wrong; in the world of which I am speaking, no time would be wasted in any such education, for every child would be born with full knowledge of what is right and wrong.  Or to state the case in psychological language—­I mean the language of scientific, not of metaphysical, psychology—­we should have a world in which morality would have been transmuted into inherited instinct.  Now again let me put the question:  can we imagine such a world?  Perhaps you will answer, Yes, in heaven—­nowhere else.  But I answer you that such a world actually exists, and that it can be studied in almost any part of the East or of Europe by a person of scientific training.  The world of insects actually furnishes examples of such a moral transformation.  It is for this reason that such writers as Sir John Lubbock and Herbert Spencer have not hesitated to say that certain kinds of social insects have immensely surpassed men, both in social and in ethical progress.

But that is not all that it is necessary to say here.  You might think that I am only repeating a kind of parable.  The important thing is the opinion of scientific men that humanity will at last, in the course of millions of years, reach the ethical conditions of the ants.  It is only five or six years ago that some of these conditions were established by scientific evidence, and I want to speak of them.  They have a direct bearing upon important ethical questions; and they have startled the whole moral world, and set men thinking in entirely new directions.

In order to explain how the study of social insects has set moralists of recent years thinking in a new direction, it will be necessary to generalize a great deal in the course of so short a lecture.  It is especially the social conditions of the ants which has inspired these new ideas; but you must not think that any one species of ants furnishes us with all the facts.  The facts have been arrived at only through the study of hundreds of different kinds of ants by hundreds of scientific men; and it is only by the consensus of their evidence that we get the ethical picture which I shall try to outline for you.  Altogether there are probably about five thousand different species of ants, and these different species represent many different stages of social evolution, from the most primitive and savage up to the most highly civilized and moral.  The details of the following picture are furnished by a number of the highest species only; that must not be forgotten.  Also, I must remind you that the morality of the ant, by the necessity of circumstance, does not extend beyond the limits of its own species.  Impeccably ethical within the community, ants carry on war outside their own borders; were it not for this, we might call them morally perfect creatures.