And to tell the whole story in a few words, the essential object, the general impulse of this curious and powerful mind, which refuses to divide science from philosophy, is to consider the insect, how it lives; to note its actions and its movements; to reach its inner from its outer life; its inward impulse from its external action; and then to climb upwards from the insect to man and from man to God.
Fabre never attempts to solve the problems which he propounds a priori. Before thinking as a philosopher he observes as a scientist. His method is strictly experimental. [[315]]“To observe the crude fact, to record it, then to ask what conclusion may be based upon this solid foundation, such is M. Fabre’s only rule; and if we oppose him with arguments he demands observations.”[15]
“See first; you can argue afterwards.” “The precise facts are alone worthy of science. They cast premature theories into oblivion.”
He always makes direct for the facts as Nature presents them. The books fail him or are not to his liking. Most of them dissect the insect; he wants it alive and acting. The best contain but the shadow of life; he prefers life itself. If he happens to quote them, it is usually to deplore their deficiencies or to correct their errors, or perhaps to do homage to a precursor or a rival, but not to borrow from them the history of an insect.
This history he wishes to take from life, and he refuses to write except according to Nature and the data provided by the living subject. His narratives are always the result of strictly conscientious and objective inquiries: he records nothing that he has not seen, and if he has sometimes heightened his pictures by somewhat vivid hues, he has [[316]]only given his style the relief and the colour of his subject. The danger of such scientific records when they are written by a man of letters and a poet like Fabre into the bargain is that there is a danger of their being written with more art than exactitude. And it is apparently this that causes so many scientists to distrust science that also claims to be literature. Fabre was not always immune from this species of discredit which the writer may so easily cast upon the scientist. But this unjust accusation was long ago withdrawn, and to-day all are agreed as to the absolute truthfulness of his portraits and his records. He has talent and imagination, it is true, but he has applied his talent to the sincere investigation of the facts, and his imagination only to achieve the more complete and faithful expression of the reality. A great thinker once uttered this profound saying: “Things are perceived in their truth only when they are perceived in their poetry.” This saying might serve as a motto for the whole of Fabre’s entomological work.
To collect the data which he requires for the foundation of his philosophical structures, Fabre is not content with observing the insect as it lives and labours when left to [[317]]itself, writing down, so to speak, at its dictation the data which it deigns to give him as it would give them to any one who possessed the same patience and the same gift for observation. After these first overtures, he seeks more confidential information; to obtain this he inverts the parts played by observer and insect; from being passive he becomes active; he provokes and interrogates, and by different experiments, often of wonderful ingenuity, he enables and even compels the insect to confide to him what it would never have divulged in the normal course of its life and occupations. Fabre is the first to think of introducing this kind of artificial observation, which he calls experiment, into the study of the animal “soul.”
To practise it more readily, he needs the insect close within his reach; more than that, he needs it under his hand, at his discretion, so to say. Neither the great museum of the fields nor the place of observation where the insects “roam at will amid the thyme and lavender” quite answers the requirements of this part of his programme. So at various points of the harmas all those appliances which we have already described were set up, “rustic achievements, clumsy combinations of trivial things.” In addition to these appliances [[318]]in the open air, there are those inside the house: some are installed in the study, so that the experimenter “can see his insects working on the very table upon which he is writing their history”;[16] others are arranged in a separate room known as the “animal laboratory.”
It is a great, silent, isolated room, brilliantly lighted by two windows facing south, upon the garden, one of which at least is always open that the insects may come and go at liberty.… The middle of the room is entirely occupied by a great table of walnut-wood, on which are arranged bottles, test-tubes, and old sardine boxes, which Fabre employs in order to watch the evolution of a thousand nameless or doubtful eggs, to observe the labours of their larvæ, the creation and hatching of cocoons, and the little miracles of metamorphosis, after a germination more wonderful than that of the acorn which makes the oak.
Covers of metallic gauze resting on earthenware saucers full of sand, a few carboys and flower-pots or sweetmeat jars closed with a square of glass; these serve for observation or experimental cages in which the progress and the actions of these tiny, living machines can be investigated.[17]
Fabre reveals a consummate skill in this difficult and delicate art of experimentation [[319]]and inducing the insect to speak. The smallest incident, insignificant to a mind less alert than his, suggests further questions or gives rise to sudden intuitions and preconceived ideas which are immediately subjected to the test of experiment. But it is not enough to question the insect; one must understand its replies; it is not enough to collect or even to provoke data. One must know how to interpret them.
And here truly we come to the prodigy; for his sympathy for animals gives M. Fabre a sort of special sense, which enables him to grasp the meaning of its actions, as though there were between it and himself some actual means of communication, something in the nature of a language.[18]