It is, in fact, impossible to regard the celibacy of persons devoted to religion or to scientific studies as the beginning of a special organisation analogous to that of worker bees.
However, it is still probable that in the human race a special differentiation has been established for the accomplishment of different and essential functions.
The organisation of human societies has certainly not followed the path by which social insects attained the formation of sexless individuals. It much more closely resembles what has taken place in some isolated animal types. A solitary bee, named Halictus quadricinctus (Fig. [27]), is characterised by the fact that the female does not die when she has laid her last eggs, as generally happens amongst insects, but remains alive to cherish her offspring. This final portion of her life does not last long, and the bee cannot play the prominent part of governess in a society of insects organised by this specialisation of elderly females.
Fig. 27.—Halictus quadricinctus.
(After Buffon.) In the human race the individual life lasts longer and a division of labour takes place in the fashion suggested by Halictus quadricinctus.
An ordinary woman ceases to be fertile at between forty and fifty years old, that is to say, at a time when, according to statistics, she has still on the average twenty years to live. During this long period, she can perform an extremely useful function in society, a function resembling that of the old mothers of Halictus quadricinctus, and consisting chiefly in the bringing up and education of the children. Who does not know the extraordinary devotion of grandmothers, and, as a general rule, of old women, who are extremely useful in bringing up children. And none the less, it must not be forgotten that, actually, old age begins too soon, that it is not what it ought to be under normal conditions, and that human life itself does not last nearly so long as it ought to do in ideal conditions. We may predict that when science occupies the preponderating place in human society that it ought to have, and when knowledge of hygiene is more advanced, human life will become much longer and the part of old people will become much more important than it is to-day.
The members of human society are not divided into sexual and neuter individuals as amongst insects, but the active life of every individual can be divided into two periods, the first one of productive activity, and the second of sterility but none the less devoted to work useful to the community. The essential difference between the two cases may be reduced to the contrast that whilst the individuals of which animal societies are composed are structurally incomplete, in human societies the individual preserves his integrity.
We come, then, to the result that the more highly organised a social being may be, so also the more highly developed is his individuality. It follows that amongst the theories which seek to control social life, those are the best which leave a field sufficiently wide and free for the development of individual initiative. The ideal which has been so often advocated and according to which the individual is to be sacrificed as completely as possible to society, cannot be regarded as in harmony with the general law of organic associations. Special conditions exist in social life in which great sacrifices are inevitable, but such an arrangement cannot be considered as general and permanent. We may predict that the more human beings succeed in advancing communal life, the fewer cases there will be in which the individual has to be sacrificed.
In the hope of subduing the egoism rooted in human nature, moralists have preached renunciation of individual happiness and the need of subordinating it to the good of the community. Very often such doctrine has borne little fruit, but there are cases where it has been embraced with such ardour that men and, still more, young women have been led to sacrifice their well-being for what they have taken to be the common good. However it may involve self-abnegation, there has been continued insistence on the duty of sacrificing the individual to the community.