Let us go on admitting and continue. The desired point is struck; the prey is duly paralysed; [[375]]the egg laid on its flank will develop in safety. Is that enough? It is at most but a half of what is absolutely necessary. Another egg is indispensable to complete the future couple and ensure offspring. Therefore, within a few days’, within a few hours’ interval, a second sting must be given, as successful as the first. In other words, the impossible has to be repeated, the impossible raised to the second degree.
Let us not be discouraged yet; let us sound the uttermost depths of the problem. Here is a Wasp, some precursor, no matter which, of our Ammophila, who, favoured by chance, has twice and perhaps oftener succeeded in reducing the prey to that state of inertia which the rearing of the egg imperatively demands. She does not know, does not suspect that she inserted her sting opposite a nerve-centre rather than elsewhere. As there was nothing to prompt her choice, she acted at random. Nevertheless, if we are to take the theory of instinct seriously, we shall have to admit that this fortuitous action, though a matter of indifference to the insect, left a lasting trace and made so great an impression that, henceforth, the cunning stratagem which produces paralysis by attacking the nervous centres is transmissible by heredity. The Ammophila’s successors, by some prodigious privilege, will inherit what the mother did [[376]]not possess. They will know by instinct the point or points towards which the sting must be directed; for, if they were still in the prentice stage, if they and their successors had to risk the chance that accident would tend gradually to strengthen the nascent impulse, they would be going back to the likelihood so near allied to nil; they would go back to it year by year, for centuries to come; and yet the one and only favourable chance would have to be always recurring. I find it very difficult to believe in a habit acquired by this prolonged repetition of incidents whereof not one can take place without excluding so many contrary chances. It is a simple matter of arithmetic to show the number of absurdities against which the theorists rush headlong.
Nor is this all. We should have to ask ourselves how casual actions, to which the insect was not predisposed by nature, can become the source of a hereditary transmissible habit. We should look upon a man as a sorry wag who came to us and said that the descendant of the desnucador knows the art of slaughtering cattle from A to Z merely through being the son of his father, without the aid of precept or example. The father does not use his blade just once or twice, by accident; he operates every day and scores of times a day; he goes to work with [[377]]reflection. It is his business. Does this lifelong practice create a transmissible habit? Are the sons, the grandsons, the great-grandsons any the wiser, without instruction? No, the thing has to start afresh each time. Man is not predisposed by nature to this butchery.
If, on her side, the Wasp excels in her art, it is because she is born to follow it, because she is endowed not only with tools, but also with the knack of using them. And this gift is original, perfect from the outset: the past has added nothing to it, the future will add nothing to it. As it was, so it is and will be. If you see in it naught but an acquired habit, which heredity hands down and improves, at least explain to us why man, who represents the highest stage in the evolution of your primitive plasma, is deprived of the like privilege. A paltry insect bequeaths its skill to its offspring; and man cannot. What an immense advantage it would be to humanity if we were less liable to see the worker succeeded by the idler, the man of talent by the idiot! Ah, why has not protoplasm, evolving by its own energy from one being into another, reserved until it came to us a little of that wonderful power which it has bestowed so lavishly upon the insects! The answer is that apparently, in this world, cellular evolution is not everything. [[378]]
For these among many other reasons, I reject the modern theory of instinct. I see in it no more than an ingenious game in which the armchair naturalist, the man who shapes the world according to his whim, is able to take delight, but in which the observer, the man grappling with reality, fails to find a serious explanation of anything whatsoever that he sees. In my own surroundings, I notice that those who are most positive in the matter of these difficult questions are those who have seen the least. If they have seen nothing at all, they go to the length of rashness. The others, the timid ones, know more or less what they are talking about. And is it not the same outside my modest environment? [[379]]
‘This night, at least, with me forget your care;
Chestnuts and curds and cream shall be your fare
The carpet-ground shall be with leaves o’erspread