Indeed what place do the communities of ants and bees occupy in the general scheme of things on earth? How could they come into being such as we observe them? All observation of life and organization finally 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 ant-hill beehive and 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 diifferent periods, had been intelligent and evolving beings and then lost their intelligence and their ability to evolve, this could have happened only becaue 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 sesnd 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?...."
"The mistake of these non-human beings, that is, the couse of their downfall, must inevitably have been of the same nature as the mistake made by Adam. They must have become convinced that they kniew 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 place 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 evolutionin 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 ahd reached a very high, although a very one-sided culture, based entirely on intellectual considerations of profit and utility, withouth any scope for imagination, without any esotericism or mysticism. They organised the whole of their life on the principles of a kind of "maximum" which seemed to them very exact and scientific. they realised the interests of the community according to their understanding for an individual to develop and separate himself from the general masses"
'And yet it was precisely this development of indivduals and their separation from the general massees which constituted the aim of Nature and on which the possibility of evolution was based. Neither the bees nor the ants wished to acknoledge 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 "experimenttof Nature, that is, every living being, every living organism, represents the expression of cosmic laws, a complex symbol of 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 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 well-organised ant-hill or beehive, became atrophied, autmatic habits began to be handed down automatically from generation to generation, and ants became "insects" as we know them; bees evven became useful."
"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, but the complete absence in their activities. The intelligence put into this organisation was very narrow and rigidly utilitarian, it caluculated 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. Intellilgence could not hand down all the laws, rules and methods of work with the same exactness from generation to generation. Intelligence could forget, could distory, could add something new. Intelligence could again lead to "mysticism", to the idea of a higer intelligence, to the idea of escotericism. 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 ."
"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."