The Fable of the Bees; Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits

by Bernard Mandeville

Cleo. I nowise doubt it: Microscopes have opened a new world to us, and I am far from thinking, that nature should leave off her work where we can trace her no further. I am persuaded that our thoughts, and the affections of the mind, have a more certain and more mechanical influence upon several parts of the body than has been hitherto or, in all human probability, ever will be discovered. The visible effect they have on the eyes and muscles of the face, must show the least attentive the reason I have for this assertion. When in mens company we are upon our guard, and would preserve our dignity, the lips are shut and the jaws meet; the muscles of the mouth are gently braced, and the rest all over the face are kept firmly in their places: turn away from these into another room, where you meet with a fine young lady that is affable and easy; immediately, before you think on it, your countenance will be strangely altered; and without being conscious of having done any thing to your face, you will have quite another look; and every body that has observed you, will discover in it more sweetness and less severity than you had the moment before. When we suffer the lower jaw to sink down, the mouth opens a little: if in this posture we look straight before us, without fixing our eyes on any thing, we may imitate the countenance of a natural; by dropping, as it were, our features, and laying no stress on any muscle of the face. Infants, before they have learned to swallow their spittle, generally keep their mouths open, and are always drivelling: in them, before they show any understanding, and whilst it is yet very confused, the muscles of the face are, as it were, relaxed, the lower jaw falls down, and the fibres of the lips are unbraced; at least, these phenomena we observe in them, during that time, more often than we do afterwards. In extreme old age, when people begin to doat, those symptoms return; and in most idiots they continue to be observed, as long as they live: Hence it is that we say, that a man wants a slabbering-bib, when he behaves very sillily or talks like a natural fool. When we reflect on all this, on the one hand, and consider on the other, that none are less prone to anger than idiots, and no creatures are less affected with pride, I would ask, whether there is not some degree of self-liking, that mechanically influences, and seems to assist us in the decent wearing of our faces.

Hor. I cannot resolve you; what I know very well is, that by these conjectures on the mechanism of man, I find my understanding very little informed: I wonder how we came upon the subject.

Cleo. You inquired into the origin of risibility, which nobody can give an account of, with any certainty; and in such cases every body is at liberty to make guesses, so they draw no conclusions from them to the prejudice of any thing better established. But the chief design I had in giving you these indigested thoughts, was to hint to you, how really mysterious the works of nature are; I mean, how replete they are every where, with a power glaringly conspicuous, and yet incomprehensible beyond all human reach; in order to demonstrate, that more useful knowledge may be acquired from unwearied observation, judicious experience, and arguing from facts à posteriori, than from the haughty attempts of entering into first causes, and reasoning à priori. I do not believe there is a man in the world of that sagacity, if he was wholly unacquainted with the nature of a spring-watch, that he would ever find out by dint of penetration the cause of its motion, if he was never to see the inside: but every middling capacity may be certain, by seeing only the outside, that its pointing at the hour, and keeping to time, proceed from the exactness of some curious workmanship that is hid; and that the motion of the hands, what number of resorts soever it is communicated by, is originally owing to something else that first moves within. In the same manner we are sure, that as the effects of thought upon the body are palpable, several motions are produced by it, by contact, and consequently mechanically: but the parts, the instruments which that operation is performed with, are so immensely far remote from our senses; and the swiftness of the action is so prodigious, that it infinitely surpasses our capacity to trace them.

Hor. But is not thinking the business of the soul? What has mechanism to do with that?

Cleo. The soul, whilst in the body, cannot be said to think, otherwise than an architect is said to build a house, where the carpenters, bricklayers, &c. do the work, which he chalks out and superintends.

Hor. Which part of the brain do you think the soul to be more immediately lodged in; or do you take it to be diffused through the whole?

Cleo. I know nothing of it more than what I have told you already.

Hor. I plainly feel that this operation of thinking is a labour, or at least something that is transacting in my head, and not in my leg nor my arm: what insight or real knowledge have we from anatomy concerning it?

Cleo. None at all à priori: the most consummate anatomist knows no more of it than a butcher’s apprentice. We may admire the curious duplicate of coats, and close embroidery of veins and arteries that environ the brain: but when dissecting it we have viewed the several pairs of nerves, with their origin, and taken notice of some glands of various shapes and sizes, which differing from the brain in substance, could not but rush in view; when these, I say, have been taken notice of, and distinguished by different names, some of them not very pertinent, and less polite, the best naturalist must acknowledge, that even of these large visible parts there are but few, the nerves and blood-vessels excepted, at the use of which he can give any tolerable guesses: but as to the mysterious structure of the brain itself, and the more abstruse economy of it, that he knows nothing; but that the whole seems to be a medullary substance, compactly treasured up in infinite millions of imperceptible cells, that, disposed in an unconceivable order, are cluttered together in a perplexing variety of folds and windings. He will add, perhaps, that it is reasonable to think this to be the capacious exchequer of human knowledge, in which the faithful senses deposit the vast treasure of images, constantly, as through their organs they receive them; that it is the office in which the spirits are separated from the blood, and afterwards sublimed and volatilized into particles hardly corporeal; and that the most minute of these are always, either searching for, or variously disposing the images retained, and shooting through the infinite meanders of that wonderful substance, employ themselves, without ceasing, in that inexplicable performance, the contemplation of which fills the most exalted genius with amazement.

Hor. These are very airy conjectures; but nothing of all this can be proved: The smallness of the parts, you will say, is the reason; but if greater improvements were made in optic glasses, and microscopes could be invented that magnified objects three or four millions of times more than they do now, then certainly those minute particles, so immensely remote from the senses you speak of, might be observed, if that which does the work is corporeal at all.