Part 9

workers or with the work. None of them would presume to address a worker,—except, perhaps, under extraordinary circumstances of common peril. And no worker would think of talking to a male;—for males, in this queer world, are inferior beings, equally incapable of fighting or working, and tolerated only as necessary evils. One special class of females,—the Mothers-Elect of the race,—do condescend to consort with males, during a very brief period, at particular seasons. But the Mothers-Elect do not work; and they _must_ accept husbands. A worker could not even dream of keeping company with a male,—not merely because such association would signify the most frivolous waste of time, nor yet because the worker necessarily regards all males with unspeakable contempt; but because the worker is incapable of wedlock. Some workers, indeed, are capable of parthenogenesis, and give birth to children who never had fathers. As a general rule, however, the worker is truly feminine by her moral instincts only: she has all the tenderness, the patience, and the foresight that we call “maternal;” but her sex has disappeared, like the sex of the Dragon-Maiden in the Buddhist legend.

For defense against creatures of prey, or enemies of the state, the workers are provided with weapons; and they are furthermore protected by a large military force. The warriors are so much bigger than the workers (in some communities, at least) that it is difficult, at first sight, to believe them of the same race. Soldiers one hundred times larger than the workers whom they guard are not uncommon. But all these soldiers are Amazons,—or, more correctly speaking, semi-females. They can work sturdily; but being built for fighting and for heavy pulling chiefly, their usefulness is restricted to those directions in which force, rather than skill, is required.

[Why females, rather than males, should have been evolutionally specialized into soldiery and laborers may not be nearly so simple a question as it appears. I am very sure of not being able to answer it. But natural economy may have decided the matter. In many forms of life, the female greatly exceeds the male in bulk and in energy;—perhaps, in this case, the larger reserve of life-force possessed originally by the complete female could be more rapidly and effectively utilized for the development of a special fighting-caste. All energies which, in the fertile female, would be expended in the giving of life seem here to have been diverted to the evolution of aggressive power, or working-capacity.]

Of the true females,—the Mothers-Elect,—there are very few indeed; and these are treated like queens. So constantly and so reverentially are they waited upon that they can seldom have any wishes to express. They are relieved from every care of existence,—except the duty of bearing offspring. Night and day they are cared for in every possible manner. They alone are superabundantly and richly fed:—for the sake of the offspring they must eat and drink and repose right royally; and their physiological specialization allows of such indulgence _ad libitum_. They seldom go out, and never unless attended by a powerful escort; as they cannot be permitted to incur unnecessary fatigue or danger. Probably they have no great desire to go out. Around them revolves the whole activity of the race: all its intelligence and toil and thrift are directed solely toward the well-being of these Mothers and of their children.

But last and least of the race rank the husbands of these Mothers,—the necessary Evils,—the males. They appear only at a particular season, as I have already observed; and their lives are very short. Some cannot even boast of noble descent, though destined to royal wedlock; for they are not royal offspring, but virgin-born,—parthenogenetic children,—and, for that reason especially, inferior beings, the chance results of some mysterious atavism. But of any sort of males the commonwealth tolerates but few,—barely enough to serve as husbands for the Mothers-Elect, and these few perish almost as soon as their duty has been done. The meaning of Nature’s law, in this extraordinary world, is identical with Ruskin’s teaching that life without effort is crime; and since the males are useless as workers or fighters, their existence is of only momentary importance. They are not, indeed, sacrificed,—like the Aztec victim chosen for the festival of Tezcatlipoca, and allowed a honeymoon of twenty days before his heart was torn out. But they are scarcely less unfortunate in their high fortune. Imagine youths brought up in the knowledge that they are destined to become royal bridegrooms for a single night,—that after their bridal they will have no moral right to live,—that marriage, for each and all of them, will signify certain death,—and that they cannot even hope to be lamented by their young widows, who will survive them for a time of many generations...!

V

But all the foregoing is no more than a proem to the real “Romance of the Insect-World.”

—By far the most startling discovery in relation to this astonishing civilization is that of the suppression of sex. In certain advanced forms of ant-life sex totally disappears in the majority of individuals;—in nearly all the higher ant-societies sex-life appears to exist only to the extent absolutely needed for the continuance of the species. But the biological fact in itself is much less startling than the ethical suggestion which it offers;—_for this practical suppression, or regulation, of sex-faculty appears to be voluntary!_ Voluntary, at least, so far as the species is concerned. It is now believed that these wonderful creatures have learned how to develop, or to arrest the development, of sex in their young,—by some particular mode of nutrition. They have succeeded in placing under perfect control what is commonly supposed to be the most powerful and unmanageable of instincts. And this rigid restraint of sex-life to within the limits necessary to provide against extinction is but one (though the most amazing) of many vital economies effected by the race. Every capacity for egoistic pleasure—in the common meaning of the word “egoistic”—has been equally repressed through physiological modification. No indulgence of any natural appetite is possible except to that degree in which such indulgence can directly or indirectly benefit the species;—even the indispensable requirements of food and sleep being satisfied only to the exact extent necessary for the maintenance of healthy activity. The individual can exist, act, think, only for the communal good; and the commune triumphantly refuses, in so far as cosmic law permits, to let itself be ruled either by Love or Hunger.

Most of us have been brought up in the belief that without some kind of religious creed—some hope of future reward or fear of future punishment—no civilization could exist. We have been taught to think that in the absence of laws based upon moral ideas, and in the absence of an effective police to enforce such laws, nearly everybody would seek only his or her personal advantage, to the disadvantage of everybody else. The strong would then destroy the weak; pity and sympathy would disappear; and the whole social fabric would fall to pieces... These teachings confess the existing imperfection of human nature; and they contain obvious truth. But those who first proclaimed that truth, thousands and thousands of years ago, never imagined a form of social existence in which selfishness would be _naturally_ impossible. It remained for irreligious Nature to furnish us with proof positive that there can exist a society in which the pleasure of active beneficence makes needless the idea of duty,—a society in which instinctive morality can dispense with ethical codes of every sort,—a society of which every member is born so absolutely unselfish, and so energetically good, that moral training could signify, even for its youngest, neither more nor less than waste of precious time.

To the Evolutionist such facts necessarily suggest that the value of our moral idealism is but temporary; and that something better than virtue, better than kindness, better than self-denial,—in the present human meaning of those terms,—might, under certain conditions, eventually replace them. He finds himself obliged to face the question whether a world without moral notions might not be morally better than a world in which conduct is regulated by such notions. He must even ask himself whether the existence of religious commandments, moral laws, and ethical standards among ourselves does not prove us still in a very primitive stage of social evolution. And these questions naturally lead up to another: Will humanity ever be able, on this planet, to reach an ethical condition beyond all its ideals,—a condition in which everything that we now call evil will have been atrophied out of existence, and everything that we call virtue have been transmuted into instinct;—a state of altruism in which ethical concepts and codes will have become as useless as they would be, even now, in the societies of the higher ants.

The giants of modern thought have given some attention to this question; and the greatest among them has answered it—partly in the affirmative. Herbert Spencer has expressed his belief that humanity will arrive at some state of civilization ethically comparable with that of the ant:—

“If we have, in lower orders of creatures, cases in which the nature is constitutionally so modified that altruistic activities have become one with egoistic activities, there is an irresistible implication that a parallel identification will, under parallel conditions, take place among human beings. Social insects furnish us with instances completely to the point,—and instances showing us, indeed, to what a marvelous degree the life of the individual may be absorbed in subserving the lives of other individuals... Neither the ant nor the bee can be supposed to have a sense of duty, in the acceptation we give to that word; nor can it be supposed that it is continually undergoing self-sacrifice, in the ordinary acceptation of that word... [The facts] show us that it is within the possibilities of organization to produce a nature which shall be just as energetic in the pursuit of altruistic ends, as is in other cases shown in the pursuit of egoistic ends;—and they show that, in such cases, these altruistic ends are pursued in pursuing ends which, on their other face, are egoistic. For the satisfaction of the needs of the organization, these actions, conducive to the welfare of others, _must_ be carried on...

“So far from its being true that there must go on, throughout all the future, a condition in which self-regard is to be continually subjected by the regard for others, it will, contrari-wise, be the case that a regard for others will eventually become so large a source of pleasure as to overgrow the pleasure which is derivable from direct egoistic gratification... Eventually, then, there will come also a state in which egoism and altruism are so conciliated that the one merges in the other.”

VI

Of course the foregoing prediction does not imply that human nature will ever undergo such physiological change as would be represented by structural specializations comparable to those by which the various castes of insect societies are differentiated. We are not bidden to imagine a future state of humanity in which the active majority would consist of semi-female workers and Amazons toiling for an inactive minority of selected Mothers. Even in his chapter, “Human Population in the Future,” Mr. Spencer has attempted no detailed statement of the physical modifications inevitable to the production of higher moral types,—though his general statement in regard to a perfected nervous system, and a great diminution of human fertility, suggests that such moral evolution would signify a very considerable amount of physical change. If it be legitimate to believe in a future humanity to which the pleasure of mutual beneficence will represent the whole joy of life, would it not also be legitimate to imagine other transformations, physical and moral, which the facts of insect-biology have proved to be within the range of evolutional possibility?... I do not know. I most worshipfully reverence Herbert Spencer as the greatest philosopher who has yet appeared in this world; and I should be very sorry to write down anything contrary to his teaching, in such wise that the reader could imagine it to have been inspired by Synthetic Philosophy. For the ensuing reflections, I alone am responsible; and if I err, let the sin be upon my own head.

I suppose that the moral transformations predicted by Mr. Spencer, could be effected only with the aid of physiological change, and at a terrible cost. Those ethical conditions manifested by insect-societies can have been reached only through effort desperately sustained for millions of years against the most atrocious necessities. Necessities equally merciless may have to be met and mastered eventually by the human race. Mr. Spencer has shown that the time of the greatest possible human suffering is yet to come, and that it will be concomitant with the period of the greatest possible pressure of population. Among other results of that long stress, I understand that there will be a vast increase in human intelligence and sympathy; and that this increase of intelligence will be effected at the cost of human fertility. But this decline in reproductive power will not, we are told, be sufficient to assure the very highest of social conditions: it will only relieve that pressure of population which has been the main cause of human suffering. The state of perfect social equilibrium will be approached, but never quite reached, by mankind—

_Unless there be discovered some means of solving economic problems, just as social insects have solved them, by the suppression of sex-life_.

Supposing that such a discovery were made, and that the human race should decide to arrest the development of sex in the majority of its young,—so as to effect a transferrence of those forces, now demanded by sex-life to the development of higher activities,—might not the result be an eventual state of polymorphism, like that of ants? And, in such event, might not the Coming Race be indeed represented in its higher types,—through feminine rather than masculine evolution,—by a majority of beings of neither sex?

Considering how many persons, even now, through merely unselfish (not to speak of religious) motives, sentence themselves to celibacy, it should not appear improbable that a more highly evolved humanity would cheerfully sacrifice a large proportion of its sex-life for the common weal, particularly in view of certain advantages to be gained. Not the least of such advantages—always supposing that mankind were able to control sex-life after the natural manner of the ants—would be a prodigious increase of longevity. The higher types of a humanity superior to sex might be able to realize the dream of life for a thousand years.

Already we find lives too short for the work we have to do; and with the constantly accelerating progress of discovery, and the never-ceasing expansion of knowledge, we shall certainly find more and more reason to regret, as time goes on, the brevity of existence. That Science will ever discover the Elixir of the Alchemists’ hope is extremely unlikely. The Cosmic Powers will not allow us to cheat them. For every advantage which they yield us the full price must be paid: nothing for nothing is the everlasting law. Perhaps the price of long life will prove to be the price that the ants have paid for it. Perhaps, upon some elder planet, that price has already been paid, and the power to produce offspring restricted to a caste morphologically differentiated, in unimaginable ways, from the rest of the species...

VII

But while the facts of insect-biology suggest so much in regard to the future course of human evolution, do they not also suggest something of largest significance concerning the relation of ethics to cosmic law? Apparently, the highest evolution will not be permitted to creatures capable of what human moral experience has in all areas condemned. Apparently, the highest possible strength is the strength of unselfishness; and power supreme never will be accorded to cruelty or to lust. There may be no gods; but the forces that shape and dissolve all forms of being would seem to be much more exacting than gods. To prove a “dramatic tendency” in the ways of the stars is not possible; but the cosmic process seems nevertheless to affirm the worth of every human system of ethics fundamentally opposed to human egoism.

Notes

THE STORY OF MIMI-NASHI-HŌÏCHI

[1] See my _Kottō_, for a description of these curious crabs.

[2] Or, Shimonoséki. The town is also known by the name of Bakkan.

[3] The _biwa_, a kind of four-stringed lute, is chiefly used in musical recitative. Formerly the professional minstrels who recited the _Heiké-Monogatari_, and other tragical histories, were called _biwa-hōshi_, or “lute-priests.” The origin of this appellation is not clear; but it is possible that it may have been suggested by the fact that “lute-priests” as well as blind shampooers, had their heads shaven, like Buddhist priests. The _biwa_ is played with a kind of plectrum, called _bachi_, usually made of horn.

(1) A response to show that one has heard and is listening attentively.

[4] A respectful term, signifying the opening of a gate. It was used by samurai when calling to the guards on duty at a lord’s gate for admission.

[5] Or the phrase might be rendered, “for the pity of that part is the deepest.” The Japanese word for pity in the original text is “_awaré_.”

[6] “Traveling incognito” is at least the meaning of the original phrase,—“making a disguised august-journey” (_shinobi no go-ryokō_).

[7] The Smaller Pragña-Pâramitâ-Hridaya-Sûtra is thus called in Japanese. Both the smaller and larger sûtras called Pragña-Pâramitâ (“Transcendent Wisdom”) have been translated by the late Professor Max Müller, and can be found in volume xlix. of the _Sacred Books of the East_ (“Buddhist Mahayana Sûtras”).—Apropos of the magical use of the text, as described in this story, it is worth remarking that the subject of the sûtra is the Doctrine of the Emptiness of Forms,—that is to say, of the unreal character of all phenomena or noumena... “Form is emptiness; and emptiness is form. Emptiness is not different from form; form is not different from emptiness. What is form—that is emptiness. What is emptiness—that is form... Perception, name, concept, and knowledge, are also emptiness... There is no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind... But when the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he [_the seeker_] becomes free from all fear, and beyond the reach of change, enjoying final Nirvana.”

OSHIDORI

[1] From ancient time, in the Far East, these birds have been regarded as emblems of conjugal affection.

[2] There is a pathetic double meaning in the third verse; for the syllables composing the proper name _Akanuma_ (“Red Marsh”) may also be read as _akanu-ma_, signifying “the time of our inseparable (or delightful) relation.” So the poem can also be thus rendered:—“When the day began to fail, I had invited him to accompany me...! Now, after the time of that happy relation, what misery for the one who must slumber alone in the shadow of the rushes!”—The _makomo_ is a short of large rush, used for making baskets.

THE STORY OF O-TEI

(1) “-sama” is a polite suffix attached to personal names.

(2) A Buddhist term commonly used to signify a kind of heaven.

[1] The Buddhist term _zokumyō_ (“profane name”) signifies the personal name, borne during life, in contradistinction to the _kaimyō_ (“sila-name”) or _homyō_ (“Law-name”) given after death,—religious posthumous appellations inscribed upon the tomb, and upon the mortuary tablet in the parish-temple.—For some account of these, see my paper entitled, “The Literature of the Dead,” in _Exotics and Retrospectives_.

[2] Buddhist household shrine.

(3) Direct translation of a Japanese form of address used toward young, unmarried women.

DIPLOMACY

(1) The spacious house and grounds of a wealthy person is thus called.

(2) A Buddhist service for the dead.

OF A MIRROR AND A BELL

(1) Part of present-day Shizuoka Prefecture.

(2) The two-hour period between 1 AM and 3 AM.

(3) A monetary unit.

JIKININKI

(1) The southern part of present-day Gifu Prefecture.

[1] Literally, a man-eating goblin. The Japanese narrator gives also the Sanscrit term, “Râkshasa;” but this word is quite as vague as _jikininki_, since there are many kinds of Râkshasas. Apparently the word _jikininki_ signifies here one of the _Baramon-Rasetsu-Gaki_,—forming the twenty-sixth class of pretas enumerated in the old Buddhist books.

[2] A _Ségaki_-service is a special Buddhist service performed on behalf of beings supposed to have entered into the condition of _gaki_ (pretas), or hungry spirits. For a brief account of such a service, see my _Japanese Miscellany_.

[3] Literally, “five-circle [or five-zone] stone.” A funeral monument consisting of five parts superimposed,—each of a different form,—symbolizing the five mystic elements: Ether, Air, Fire, Water, Earth.

MUJINA

(1) A kind of badger. Certain animals were thought to be able to transform themselves and cause mischief for humans.

[1] O-jochū (“honorable damsel”), a polite form of address used in speaking to a young lady whom one does not know.

(2) An apparition with a smooth, totally featureless face, called a “nopperabo,” is a stock part of the Japanese pantheon of ghosts and demons.

[2] Soba is a preparation of buckwheat, somewhat resembling vermicelli.

(3) An exclamation of annoyed alarm.

(4) Well!

ROKURO-KUBI

[1] The period of Eikyō lasted from 1429 to 1441.

[2] The upper robe of a Buddhist priest is thus called.

(1) Present-day Yamanashi Prefecture.

(2) A term for itinerant priests.

[3] A sort of little fireplace, contrived in the floor of a room, is thus described. The _ro_ is usually a square shallow cavity, lined with metal and half-filled with ashes, in which charcoal is lighted.

(3) Direct translation of “suzumushi,” a kind of cricket with a distinctive chirp like a tiny bell, whence the name.

(4) Now a rokuro-kubi is ordinarily conceived as a goblin whose neck stretches out to great lengths, but which nevertheless always remains attached to its body.

(5) A Chinese collection of stories on the supernatural.

[4] A present made to friends or to the household on returning from a journey is thus called. Ordinarily, of course, the _miyagé_ consists of something produced in the locality to which the journey has been made: this is the point of Kwairyō’s jest.

(6) Present-day Nagano Prefecture.

A DEAD SECRET

(1) On the present-day map, Tamba corresponds roughly to the central area of Kyōto Prefecture and part of Hyogo Prefecture.

[1] The Hour of the Rat (_Né-no-Koku_), according to the old Japanese method of reckoning time, was the first hour. It corresponded to the time between our midnight and two o’clock in the morning; for the ancient Japanese hours were each equal to two modern hours.

[2] _Kaimyō_, the posthumous Buddhist name, or religious name, given to the dead. Strictly speaking, the meaning of the word is sila-name. (See my paper entitled, “The Literature of the Dead” in _Exotics and Retrospectives_.)

YUKI-ONNA

(1) An ancient province whose boundaries took in most of present-day Tōkyō, and parts of Saitama and Kanagawa prefectures.

[1] That is to say, with a floor-surface of about six feet square.

[2] This name, signifying “Snow,” is not uncommon. On the subject of Japanese female names, see my paper in the volume entitled _Shadowings_.

(2) Also spelled Edo, the former name of Tōkyō.

THE STORY OF AOYAGI

(1) An ancient province corresponding to the northern part of present-day Ishikawa Prefecture.

(2) An ancient province corresponding to the eastern part of present-day Fukui Prefecture.

[1] The name signifies “Green Willow;”—though rarely met with, it is still in use.