One can not say that humanity has attained its intellectual limits, although its physical evolution seems completed; but as superior human specimens are nearly always sterile, or capable of only mediocre posterity, it is found that, alone among values, intelligence is not transmitted by generation. Then the circle closes and the same effort ends ceaselessly in the same recommencement. However, even here, artificial means intervene, and the transmission of the acquisitions of intelligence is relatively assured by all sorts of instruments. This mechanism, much inferior to carnal generation, permits us, if the most exquisite forms of intelligence disappear as fast as they flower, to preserve at least part of their contents. Notions are transmitted, that is a result, even though most of them are vain, in default of sensibilities sufficiently powerful to assimilate them and make a real life of them.
Finally, if man ought to abdicate, which seems unlikely, animality is rich enough to raise up an inheritor. The candidates for humanity are in great number, and they are not those whom the crowd supposes. Who knows if our descendants may not some day find themselves faced with a rival, strong and in the flower of youth. Creation has not gone on strike, since man appeared: since making this monster, nature has continued her work: the human hazard might reproduce itself on the morrow.
[1] The Latin luxuria and French luxure have no exact English equivalent; our "luxury," is the French luxe; the phrase "the exercise of pleasant lusts" is perhaps as near as I can come to a definition of luxure.—Translator.
[2] Fabre's experiments on mason bees, the shaggy ammophile, and great-peacock moth.
[TRANSLATOR'S POSTSCRIPT]
"Il y aurait peut-être une certain correlation entre la copulation complète et profonde et le développement cérébral."
Not only is this suggestion, made by our author at the end of his eighth chapter, both possible and probable, but it is more than likely that the brain itself, is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve; at first over the cervical ganglion, or, earlier or in other species, held in several clots over the scattered chief nerve centres; and augmenting in varying speeds and quantities into medulla oblongata, cerebellum and cerebrum. This hypothesis would perhaps explain a certain number of as yet uncorrelated phenomena both psychological and physiological. It I would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images. Species would have developed in accordance with, or their development would have been affected by, the relative discharge and retention of the fluid; this proportion being both a matter of quantity and of quality, some animals profiting hardly at all by the alluvial Nile-flood; the baboon retaining nothing; men apparently stupefying themselves in some cases by excess, and in other cases discharging apparently only a surplus at high pressure; the gateux, or the genius, the "strong-minded."
I offer an idea rather than an argument, yet if we consider sider that the power of the spermatozoide is precisely the power of exteriorizing a form; and if we consider the lack of any other known substance in nature capable of growing into brain, we are left with only one surprise, or rather one conclusion, namely, in face of the smallness of the average brain's activity, we must conclude that the spermatozoic substance must have greatly atrophied in its change from lactic to coagulated and hereditarily coagulated condition. Given, that is, two great seas of this fluid, mutually magnetized, the wonder is, or at least the first wonder is, that human thought is so inactive.
Chemical research may have something to say on the subject, if it be directed to comparison of brain and spermatophore in the nautilus, to the viscous binding of the bee's fecundative liquid. I offer only reflections, perhaps a few data. Indications of earlier adumbrations of an idea which really surprises no one, but seems as if it might have been lying on the study table of any physician or philosopher.