and hunger, death, time, space, and solitude, all the enemies of matter that is springing to life; but should a creature succeed in maintaining its little profound and complicated existence without overstepping the boundaries of instinct, without doing anything but what is ordinary, that would be very interesting too, and very extraordinary.  Restore the ordinary and the marvellous to their veritable place in the bosom of nature, and their values shift; one equals the other.  We find that their names are usurped; and that it is not they, but the things we cannot understand or explain that should arrest our attention, refresh our activity, and give a new and juster form to our thoughts and feelings and words.  There is wisdom in attaching oneself to nought beside.

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And further, our intellect is not the proper tribunal before which to summon the bees, and pass their faults in review.  Do we not find, among ourselves, that consciousness and intellect long will dwell in the midst of errors and faults without perceiving them, longer still without effecting a remedy?  If a being exist whom his destiny calls upon most specially, almost organically, to live and to organise common life in accordance with pure reason, that being is man.  And yet see what he makes of it, compare the mistakes of the hive with those of our own society.  How should we marvel, for instance, were we bees observing men, as we noted the unjust, illogical distribution of work among a race of creatures that in other directions appear to manifest eminent reason!  We should find the earth’s surface, unique source of all common life, insufficiently, painfully cultivated by two or three tenths of the whole population; we should find another tenth absolutely idle, usurping the larger share of the products of this first labour; and the remaining seven-tenths condemned to a life of perpetual half-hunger, ceaselessly exhausting themselves in strange and sterile efforts whereby they never shall profit, but only shall render more complex and more inexplicable still the life of the idle.  We should conclude that the reason and moral sense of these beings must belong to a world entirely different from our own, and that they must obey principles hopelessly beyond our comprehension.  But let us carry this review of our faults no further.  They are always present in our thoughts, though their presence achieves but little.  From century to century only will one of them for a moment shake off its slumber, and send forth a bewildered cry; stretch the aching arm that supported its head, shift its position, and then lie down and fall asleep once more, until a new pain, born of the dreary fatigue of repose, awaken it afresh.

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