Yes, but the miracle comes as such a surprise that, the moment we set foot in it, a sort of instinctive aberration seizes us, refusing to accept the evidence and compelling us to search in every direction to see if there is not another outlet. Even in the presence of those astounding horses and while they are working before our eyes, we do not yet sincerely believe that which fills and subdues our gaze. We accept the facts, because there is no means of escaping them; but we accept them only provisionally and with all reserve, putting off till later the comfortable explanation which will give us back our familiar, shallow certainties. But the explanation does not come; there is none in the homely and not very lofty regions wherein we hoped to find one; there is neither fault nor flaw in the mighty evidence; and nothing delivers us from the mystery.
It must be confessed that this mystery, springing from a point where we least expected to come upon the unknown, bears enough within itself to scatter all our convictions. Remember that, since man appeared upon this earth, he has lived among creatures which, from immemorial experience, he thought that he knew as perfectly as he knows an object fashioned by his hands. Out of these creatures he chose the most docile and, as he called them, the most intelligent, attaching in this case to the word intelligence a sense so narrow as to be almost ridiculous. He observed them, scrutinized them, tried them, analyzed them and dissected them in every imaginable way; and whole lives were devoted to nothing but the study of their habits, their faculties, their nervous system, their pathology, their psychology, their instincts. All this led to certainties which, among those supported by our unexplained little existence on an inexplicable planet, would seem to be the least doubtful, the least subject to revision. There is no disputing, for instance, that the horse is gifted with an extraordinary memory, that he possesses the sense of direction, that he understands a few signs and even a few words and that he obeys them. It is equally undeniable that the anthropoid apes are capable of imitating a great number of our actions and of our attitudes: but it is also manifest that their bewildered and feverish imagination perceives neither their object nor their scope. As for the dog, the one of all these privileged animals who lives closest to us, who for thousands and thousands of years has eaten at our table and worked with us and been our friend, it is manifest that, now and then, we catch a rather uncanny gleam in his deep, watchful eyes.
It is certain that he sometimes wanders in a curious fashion along the mysterious border that separates our own intelligence from that which we grant to the other creatures inhabiting this earth with us. But it is no less certain that he has never definitely passed it. We know exactly how far he can go; and we have invariably found that our efforts, our patience, our encouragement, our passionate appeals, have hitherto failed to draw him out of the somewhat narrow, darkly enchanted circle wherein nature seems to have imprisoned him once and for all.
There remains, it is true, the insect-world, in which marvellous things happen. It includes architects, geometricians, mechanicians, engineers, weavers, physicists, chemists and surgeons who have forestalled most of our human inventions. I need not here remind the reader of the wasps' and bees' genius for building, the social and economic organization of the hive and the ant-hill, the spider's snares, the eumenes' nest and hanging egg, the odynerus' cell with its neat stacks of game, the sacred beetle's filthy but ingenius ball, the leafcutter's faultless disks, the brick-laying of the mason-bee, the three dagger-thrusts which the aphex administers to the three nerve-centres of the cricket, the lancet of the cerceris, who paralyses her victims without killing them and preserves them for an indefinite period as fresh meat, nor a thousand other features which it would be impossible to enumerate without recapitulating the whole of Henri Fabre's work and completely altering the proportions of the present essay. But here such silence and such darkness reign that we have nothing to hope for. There exists, so to speak, no bench-mark, no means of communication between the world of insects and our own; and we are perhaps less far from grasping and fathoming what takes place in Saturn or Jupiter than what is enacted in the ant-hill or the hive. We know absolutely nothing of the quality, the number, the extent or even the nature of their senses. Many of the great laws on which our life is based do not exist for them: those, for instance, which govern fluids are completely reversed. They seem to inhabit our planet, but in reality move in an entirely different world. Understanding nothing of their intelligence pierced with disconcerting gaps, in which the blindest stupidity suddenly comes and destroys the ablest and most inspired schemes, we have given the name of instinct to that which we could not apprehend, postponing our interpretation of a word that touches upon life's most insoluble riddles. There is, therefore, from the point of view of the intellectual faculties, nothing to be gathered from those extraordinary creatures who are not, like the other animals, our "lesser brothers," but strangers, aliens from we know not where, survivors or percursors of another world.
