Passing to facts, we must admit that insects are in no way a stage preparatory to the formation of man. Nor could they be regarded as the by-product of human evolution. On the contrary, insects reveal, in their structure and in the structure-of their separate parts and organs, forms which are often more perfect than those of man or animals. And we cannot help seeing that for certain forms of insect life which we observe there is no explanation without very complicated hypotheses, which necessitate the recognition of a very rich past behind them and compel us to regard the present forms we observe as degenerated forms.
This last consideration relates mainly to the organised communities of ants and bees. It is impossible to become acquainted with their life without giving oneself up to emotional impressions of astonishment and bewilderment. Ants and bees alike both call for our admiration by the wonderful completeness of their organisation, and at the same time repel and frighten us, and provoke a feeling of undefinable aversion by the invariably cold reasoning which dominates their life and by the absolute impossibility for an individual to escape from the wheel of life of the ant-hill or the beehive. We are terrified at the thought that we may resemble them.
Indeed what place do the communities of ants and bees occupy in the general scheme of things on our earth? How could they come into being such as we observe them? All observations of their life and their organisation inevitably lead us to one conclusion. The original organisation of the " beehive " and the " ant-hill " in the remote past undoubtedly required reasoning and logical intelligence of great power, although at the same time the further existence of both the beehive and the ant-hill did not require any intelligence or reasoning at all.
How could this have happened?
It could only have happened in one way. If ants or bees, or both, of course at different periods, had been intelligent and evolving beings and then lost their intelligence and their ability to evolve, this could have happened only because their " intelligence " went against their " evolution ", in other words, because in thinking that they were helping their evolution they managed somehow to arrest it.
One may suppose that both ants and bees came from the Great Laboratory and were sent to earth with the privilege and the possibility of evolving. But after a long period of struggle and efforts both the one and the other renounced their privilege and ceased to evolve, or, to be more exact, ceased to send forth an evolving current. After this Nature had to take her own measures and, after isolating them in a certain way, to begin a new experiment.
If we admit the possibility of this, may we not suppose that the old legends of falls which preceded the fall of man relate to ants and bees? We may find ourselves disconcerted by their small size as compared to our own. But the size of living beings is, first of all, a relative thing, and secondly it changes very easily in certain cases. In the case of certain classes of beings, for instance fishes, amphibious animals and insects. Nature holds in her hands the threads that regulate their size and never lets these threads go. In other words Nature possesses the power of changing the size of these living beings without altering anything in them, and can effect this change in one generation, that is, at once, simply by arresting their development at a certain stage. Everyone has seen small fishes exactly like large fishes, small frogs, etc. This is still more evident in the vegetable world. But of course it is not a universal rule, and some beings such as man and most of the higher mammals reach almost the largest size possible for them. As regards the insects, ants and bees most probably could be much larger than they are now, although this point may be argued; and it is possible that the change of size of the ant or the bee would necessitate a considerable alteration in their inner organisation.
It is interesting to note here the legends of gigantic ants in Tibet recorded by Herodotus and Pliny (Herodotus, History, Bk. XI; Pliny, Natural History, Bk. III).
Of course it will be difficult at first to imagine Lucifer as a bee, or the Titans as ants. But if we renounce for the moment the idea of the necessity of a human form, the greater part of the difficulty disappears.
The mistake of these non-human beings, that is, the cause of their downfall, must inevitably have been of the same nature as the mistake made by Adam. They must have become convinced that they knew what was good and what was evil, and must have believed that they themselves could act according to their understanding. They renounced the idea of higher knowledge and the inner circle of life and placed their faith in their own knowledge, their own powers and their own understanding of the aims and purposes of their existence. But their understanding was probably much more wrong and their mistake much less naive than the mistake of Adam, and the results of this mistake were probably so much more serious that ants and bees not only arrested their evolution in one cycle, but made it altogether impossible by altering their very being.
The ordering of the life of both bees and ants, their ideal communistic organisation, indicate the character and the form of their downfall. It may be imagined that at different times both bees and ants had reached a very high, although a very one-sided culture, based entirelyon intellectual considerations of profit and utility, without any scope for imagination, without any esotericism or mysticism. They organised the whole of their life on the principles of a kind of " marxism " which seemed to them very exact and scientific. They realised the socialistic order of things, entirely subjugating the individual to the interests of the community according to their understanding of those interests. And thus they destroyed every possibility for an individual to develop and separate himself from the general masses.
And yet it was precisely this development of individuals and their separation from the general masses which constituted the aim of Nature and on which the possibility of evolution was based. Neither the, bees nor the ants wished to acknowledge this. They saw their aim in something else, they strove to subjugate Nature. And in some way or other they altered Nature's plan, made the execution of this plan impossible.
We must bear in mind that, as has been said before, every " experiment " of Nature, that is, every living being, every living organism, represents the expression of cosmic laws, a complex symbol or a complex hieroglyph. Having begun to alter their being, their life and their form, bees and ants, taken as individuals, severed their connection with the laws of Nature, ceased to express these laws individually and began to express them only collectively. And then Nature raised her magic wand, and they became small insects, incapable of doing Nature any harm.
In the course of time their thinking capacities, absolutely unnecessary in a wellorganised
ant-hill or beehive, became atrophied, automatic habits began to be handed down automatically from generation to generation, and ants became " insects " as we know them; bees even became useful.1
Indeed, when observing an ant-hill or a beehive, we are always struck by two things, first by the amount of intelligence and calculation put into their primary organisation and, secondly, by the complete absence of intelligence in their activities. The intelligence put into this organisation was very narrow and rigidly utilitarian, it calculated correctly within the given conditions and it saw nothing outside these conditions. Yet even this intelligence was necessary only for the original calculation and estimation. Once started, the mechanism of a beehive or of an ant-hill did not require any intelligence; automatic habits and customs were automatically learned and handed down, and this ensured their being preserved unchanged.
" Intelligence " is not only useless in a beehive or an ant-hill, it would even be dangerous and harmful. Intelligence could not hand down all the laws, rules and methods of work with the same exactness from generation to generation. Intelligence could forget, could distort, could add something new. Intelligence could again lead to " mysticism ", to the idea of a higher intelligence, to the idea of esotericism. It was therefore necessary to banish intelligence from an ideal socialistic beehive or ant-hill, as an element harmful to the community—which in fact it is.
Of course there may have been a struggle, a period when the ancestors of ants or bees who had not yet lost the power of thinking saw the situation clearly, saw the inevitable beginning of degeneration and strove to fight against it, trying to free the individual from its unconditional submission to the community. But the struggle was hopeless and could have no result. The iron laws of the ant-hill and beehive very soon dealt with the restless element and after a few generations such recalcitrants probably ceased to be born, and both the beehive and the ant-hill gradually became ideal communistic states.
In his book The Life of the White Ant, Maurice Maeterlinck has collected much interesting material about the Life of these insects, which are still more striking than ants and bees.
At the very first attempts to study the life of white ants Maeterlinck experiences the same strange emotional feeling of which I spoke earlier.
. . .it makes them almost our brothers, and from certain points of view, causes these wretched insects, more than the bee or any other living creature on earth, to become the heralds, perhaps the precursors, of our own destiny.
Further, Maeterlinck dwells upon the antiquity of the termites, which are much more ancient than man, and upon the number and great variety of their species.
After this Maeterlinck passes to what he calls the " civilisation of the termites ".
Their civilisation which is the earliest of any is the most curious, the most complex, the most intelligent, and in a sense, the most logical and best fitted to the difficulties of existence, which has ever appeared before our own on this globe. From several points of view this civilisation, although fierce, sinister and often repulsive, is superior to that of the bee, of the ant, and even of man himself.
In the termitary the gods of communism become insatiable Molochs. The more they are given, the more they require; and they persist in their demands until the individual is annihilated and his misery complete. This appalling tyranny is unexampled among mankind; for while with us it at least benefits the few, in the termitary no one profits.
The discipline is more ferocious than that of the Carmelites or Trappists; and the voluntary submission to laws or regulations proceeding one knows not whence is unparalleled in any human society. A new form of fatality, perhaps the cruellest of all, the social fatality to which we ourselves are drifting, has been added to those we have met already and thought quite enough. There is no rest except in the last sleep of all: illness is not tolerated, and feebleness carries with it its own sentence of death. Communism is pushed to the limits of cannibalism and coprophagy.
. . . compelling the sacrifice and misery of the many for the advantage or happiness of none—and all this in order that a kind of universal despair may be continued, renewed and multiplied so long as the world shall last. These cities of insects, that appeared before we did, might almost serve as a caricature of ourselves, as a travesty of the earthly paradise to which most civilised people are tending.
Maeterlinck shows by what sacrifices this ideal regime is bought.
They used to have wings, they have them no more. They had eyes which they surrendered. They had a sex; they have sacrificed it.
The only thing he omits to say is that before sacrificing wings, sight, and sex, the termites had to sacrifice their intelligence.
In spite of this the process through which the termites passed is called by Maeterlinck evolution. This comes about because, as I have said before, every change of form taking place over a long period of time is called evolution by modern thought. The power of this compulsory stereotype of pseudo-scientific thinking is truly astounding. In the Middle Ages philosophers and scientists had to make all their theories and discussions agree with the dogmas of the Church, and in our day the role of those dogmas is played by " evolution ". It is quite clear that thought cannot develop freely in these conditions.
The idea of esotericism has a particularly important significance at the present stage of the development of the thought of humanity, because it makes quite unnecessary the idea of evolution in the ordinary sense of this word. It has been said earlier what the word " evolution " may mean in the esoteric sense, namely, the transformation of individuals. And in this meaning alone evolution cannot be confused degeneration as is constantly done by " scientific " thought, which regards even its own degeneration as evolution.
The only way out of all the blind alleys created by both " materialistic " and metaphysical thought lies in the psychological method. The psychological method is nothing other than the revaluation of all values from the point of view of their own psychological meaning and independently of the outer or accompanying facts on the basis of which they are generally judged. Facts may lie. The psychological meaning of a thing, or of an idea, cannot lie. Of course it also can be understood wrongly. But this can be struggled against by studying and observing the mind, that is, our apparatus of cognition. Generally the mind is regarded much too simply, without taking into account that the limits of useful action of the mind, first, are very well known, and, second, are very restricted. The psychological method takes into consideration these limitations in the same way as we take into consideration, in all ordinary circumstances of life, limitations of machines or instruments with which we have to work. If we examine something under a microscope, we take into consideration the power of the microscope; if we do some work with a particular instrument, we take into consideration properties and qualities of the instrument— weight, sharpness, etc. The psychological method aims at doing the same in relation to our mind, that is, it aims at keeping the mind itself constantly in its field of view, and at regarding all conclusions and discoveries relatively to the state or kind of mind. From the point of view of the psychological method there are no grounds for thinking that our mind, that is, our apparatus of cognition, is the only possible one or the best in existence. Equally there are no grounds for thinking that all discovered and established truths will always remain truths. On the contrary, from the point of view of the psychological method there can be no doubt that we shall have to discover many new truths, either entirely incomprehensible truths, the very existence of which we never suspected, or truths fundamentally contradicting those which we have recognised until now. Of course nothing is more terrifying and nothing is more inadmissible for all kinds of dogmatism. The psychological method destroys all old and new prejudices and superstitions; it does not allow thought to stop and remain contented with the attained results, no matter how tempting and pleasant these results may appear, and no matter how symmetrical and smooth all deductions made from them may be. The psychological method gives the possibility of re-examining many principles which have been considered as finally and firmly established, and it finds in them entirely new and unexpected meaning. The psychological method makes it possible in many cases to disregard facts or what are taken for facts, and allows us to see beyond facts. Although it is only a method, the psychological method nevertheless leads us in a very definite direction, namely towards the esoteric method, which is in reality an enlarged psychological method, though enlarged in that sense in which we cannot enlarge it by our own efforts.
