He also pointed out the fact that the sting of the insect is able immediately to dissociate the nervous system of the vegetative life from that of the correlative life, sparing the former, and taking care not to wound the abdomen, which contains the ganglions of the great sympathetic nerve, while it annihilates the latter, which is more or less concentrated along the ventral face of the thoracic region.
He completed this splendid demonstration, not only by provoking under his own eyes the "murderous manoeuvres, the intimate and passionate drama," but also by reproducing experimentally all these astonishing phenomena; expounding their mechanism and their variations with a logic and lucidity, an art and sagacity which raise this marvellous observation, one of the most beautiful known to science, to the height of the most immortal discoveries of physiology. Claude Bernard, in his celebrated experiments, certainly exhibited no greater invention, no truer genius.
[CHAPTER 8. THE MIRACLE OF INSTINCT.]
"The Spirit Bloweth Whither it Listeth."
What is this instinct, which guides the insect to such marvellous results? Is it merely a degree of intelligence, or some absolutely different form of activity?
Is it possible, by studying the habits of animals, to discover some of those elementary springs of action whose knowledge would enable us to dive more deeply into our own natures?
Fabre has presented us to his Sphex, the "infallible paralyser." Are we to credit her not only with memory, but also with the faculty of associating ideas, of judgment, and of pursuing a train of reasoning in respect of her astonishingly co-ordinated actions?
Put to the question by the malice of the operator, the "transcendent" anatomist trips over a mere trifle, and the slightest novelty confounds her.
Without the circle of her ordinary habits, what stupidity, "what darkness wraps her round"! She retreats; she refuses to understand; "she washes her eyes, first passing her hands across her mouth; she assumes a dreamy, meditative air." What can she be pondering? Under what form of thought, illusion, or mirage does the unfamiliar problem which has obtruded itself into her customary life present itself behind those faceted eyes? [(8/1.)]
How can we tell? We can only attain to knowledge of ourselves by direct intuition. It is only the idea of our ego which enables us to conjecture what is passing in the brains of our fellows. Between the insect and ourselves no understanding is possible, so remote are the analogies between its organization and our own; and we can only form idle hypotheses as to its states of consciousness and the real motive of its actions.