But the very idea of an aim is a human illusion. There is neither beginning, nor middle, nor end in the series of causes. What is has been caused by what was, and what will be has for cause the existent. One can neither conceive a point of rest nor a point of beginning. Born of life, life will beget life eternally She should, and wants to. Life is characterized on earth by the existence of individuals grouped into species, that is to say having the power, a male being united with a female, to reproduce a similar being. Whether it be the internal conjoining of protozoaires, or hermaphrodite fecundation, or the coupling of insects or mammifers, the act is the same: it is common to all that lives, and this not only to animals but to plants, and possibly even to such minerals as are limited by a non varying form. Of all possible acts, in the possibility that we can imagine, the sexual act is, therefore, the most important of all acts. Without it life comes to an end, and it is absurd to suppose its absence, for in that case thought itself disappears.
Revolt is useless against so evident a necessity. Our finikin scruples protest in vain; man and the most disgusting of his parasites are the products of an identical sexual mechanism. The flowers we have strewn upon love may disguise it as one disguises a trap for wild beasts; all our activities manúuvre along the edge of this precipice and fall over it one after another; the aim of human life is the continuation of human life.
Only in appearance does man escape this obligation of Nature. He escapes as an individual, and he submits as a species. The abuse of thought, religious prejudices, vices sterilize a part of humanity; but this fraction is of merely sociological interest; be he chaste or voluptuary, miserly or prodigal of his flesh, man is in his whole condition subject to the sexual tyranny. All men do not reproduce their species, neither do all animals; the feeble and the late comers among insects die in their robe of innocence, and many nests laboriously filled by courageous mothers are devastated by pirates or by the inclemency of the sky. Let the ascetic not come boasting that he has freed his blood from the pressure of desire; the very importance which he ascribes to his victory but affirms the same power of the life will.
A young girl, before the slightest love affair, will, if she is healthy, confess naively that she "wants to marry to have children." This so simple formula is the legend of Nature. What an animal seeks is not its own life but reproduction. Doubtless many animals seem, during a relatively long existence, to have but brief sexual periods, but one must make allowance for the period of gestation. In principle the sole occupation of any creature is to renew, by the sex act, the form wherewith it is clothed. To this end it eats to this end builds. This act is so clearly the aim, unique and definite that it constitutes the entire life of a very great number of animals, which are, notwithstanding, extremely complex.
The ephemera is born in the evening, and copulates the female lays eggs during the night, both are dead in the morning, without even having looked at the sun. These little animals are so little destined for anything else save love that they have not even mouths. They eat not, neither do they drink. One sees them hovering in clouds above the water, among the reeds. The males, although more numerous than the females, perform a multiple duty, and fall exhausted. The purity of such a life is to be admired in many butterflies: the silk moths, heavy and clumsy, shake their wings for an instant at birth, couple and die. The Great Peacock or Oak Bombyx, much larger than they, eats no more than they do: yet we see him traverse leagues of country in his quest of the female. He has only a rudimentary proboscis and a fake digestive apparatus. Thus his two or three days' existence passes without one egoistic act The struggle for life, much vaunted, is here the struggle to give life, the struggle for death, for if they can live three days in search of the female they die as soon as the fecundation is accomplished. Among all solitary bees, scolies, masons, bembex, and anthopores, the males born soonest, range about the nests awaiting the birth of the females. As soon as these appear they are seized and fecundated, knowing, thus, life and love in the same shiver. The female osmies and other bees are keenly watched by the males who nab and mount them as they emerge from the natal tube, the hollow stalk of a reed, flying at once with them into the air where the love feast is finished. Then while the male, drunk with his work, continues his deathflight, the female feverishly hollows the house of her offspring, partitions it, stores the honey for the larva, lays, whirls for an instant and dies. The year following: the same gestures above the same reeds split by the reed−gatherers; and thus in years following, the insect permitted never the least design save the conservation of one fragile form; brief apparition over flowers.
The sitaris is a coleopterous parasite in the nests of the anthopore. Copulation takes place on hatching. Fabre noticed a female still in her wrappings, whom a male already free was helping to get loose, waiting only the appearance of the extremity of the abdomen, to hurl himself thereupon. The sitaris' love lasts one minute, long season in a short life: the male drags on for two days before dying, the female lays on the very spot where she has been fecundated, dies, having known nothing but the maternal function in the strictest limit of her birthplace.
No one has ever seen the female palingenia. This butterfly is fecundated before even getting rid of her nymph's corset, she dies with her eyes still shut, mother, at once, and infant in swaddling clothes. Moralists love bees from whom they distil examples and aphorisms. They recommend us work, order, economy, foresight, obedience and divers virtues other. Abandon yourself boldly to labour: Nature wills it. Nature wills everything. She is complacent to all the activities; to our imaginings there is no analogy that she will refuse, not one. She desires the social constructions of bees; she desires also the Life All Love of the "Great Peacock," of the osmie, of the sitarist She desires that the forms she has created shall continue indefinitely, and to this end all means are, to her, good. But if she presents us the laborious example of the bee, she does not hide from us the polyandrous example, nor the cruel amours of the mantis. There is not in the will to live the faintest trace of our poor little human morality. If one wishes an unique sole morality, that is to say an universal commandment, which all species may listen to, which they can follow in spirit and in letter, if one wishes in short to know the "aim of life" and the duty of the living, it is necessary, evidently, to find a formula which will totalize all the contradictions, break them and fuse them into a sole affirmation. There is but one, we may repeat it, without fear, and without allowing any objection: the aim of life is life's continuation.
Revolt is useless against so evident a necessity. Our finikin scruples protest in vain; man and the most disgusting of his parasites are the products of an identical sexual mechanism. The flowers we have strewn upon love may disguise it as one disguises a trap for wild beasts; all our activities manúuvre along the edge of this precipice and fall over it one after another; the aim of human life is the continuation of human life.
Only in appearance does man escape this obligation of Nature. He escapes as an individual, and he submits as a species. The abuse of thought, religious prejudices, vices sterilize a part of humanity; but this fraction is of merely sociological interest; be he chaste or voluptuary, miserly or prodigal of his flesh, man is in his whole condition subject to the sexual tyranny. All men do not reproduce their species, neither do all animals; the feeble and the late comers among insects die in their robe of innocence, and many nests laboriously filled by courageous mothers are devastated by pirates or by the inclemency of the sky. Let the ascetic not come boasting that he has freed his blood from the pressure of desire; the very importance which he ascribes to his victory but affirms the same power of the life will.
A young girl, before the slightest love affair, will, if she is healthy, confess naively that she "wants to marry to have children." This so simple formula is the legend of Nature. What an animal seeks is not its own life but reproduction. Doubtless many animals seem, during a relatively long existence, to have but brief sexual periods, but one must make allowance for the period of gestation. In principle the sole occupation of any creature is to renew, by the sex act, the form wherewith it is clothed. To this end it eats to this end builds. This act is so clearly the aim, unique and definite that it constitutes the entire life of a very great number of animals, which are, notwithstanding, extremely complex.
The ephemera is born in the evening, and copulates the female lays eggs during the night, both are dead in the morning, without even having looked at the sun. These little animals are so little destined for anything else save love that they have not even mouths. They eat not, neither do they drink. One sees them hovering in clouds above the water, among the reeds. The males, although more numerous than the females, perform a multiple duty, and fall exhausted. The purity of such a life is to be admired in many butterflies: the silk moths, heavy and clumsy, shake their wings for an instant at birth, couple and die. The Great Peacock or Oak Bombyx, much larger than they, eats no more than they do: yet we see him traverse leagues of country in his quest of the female. He has only a rudimentary proboscis and a fake digestive apparatus. Thus his two or three days' existence passes without one egoistic act The struggle for life, much vaunted, is here the struggle to give life, the struggle for death, for if they can live three days in search of the female they die as soon as the fecundation is accomplished. Among all solitary bees, scolies, masons, bembex, and anthopores, the males born soonest, range about the nests awaiting the birth of the females. As soon as these appear they are seized and fecundated, knowing, thus, life and love in the same shiver. The female osmies and other bees are keenly watched by the males who nab and mount them as they emerge from the natal tube, the hollow stalk of a reed, flying at once with them into the air where the love feast is finished. Then while the male, drunk with his work, continues his deathflight, the female feverishly hollows the house of her offspring, partitions it, stores the honey for the larva, lays, whirls for an instant and dies. The year following: the same gestures above the same reeds split by the reed−gatherers; and thus in years following, the insect permitted never the least design save the conservation of one fragile form; brief apparition over flowers.
The sitaris is a coleopterous parasite in the nests of the anthopore. Copulation takes place on hatching. Fabre noticed a female still in her wrappings, whom a male already free was helping to get loose, waiting only the appearance of the extremity of the abdomen, to hurl himself thereupon. The sitaris' love lasts one minute, long season in a short life: the male drags on for two days before dying, the female lays on the very spot where she has been fecundated, dies, having known nothing but the maternal function in the strictest limit of her birthplace.
No one has ever seen the female palingenia. This butterfly is fecundated before even getting rid of her nymph's corset, she dies with her eyes still shut, mother, at once, and infant in swaddling clothes. Moralists love bees from whom they distil examples and aphorisms. They recommend us work, order, economy, foresight, obedience and divers virtues other. Abandon yourself boldly to labour: Nature wills it. Nature wills everything. She is complacent to all the activities; to our imaginings there is no analogy that she will refuse, not one. She desires the social constructions of bees; she desires also the Life All Love of the "Great Peacock," of the osmie, of the sitarist She desires that the forms she has created shall continue indefinitely, and to this end all means are, to her, good. But if she presents us the laborious example of the bee, she does not hide from us the polyandrous example, nor the cruel amours of the mantis. There is not in the will to live the faintest trace of our poor little human morality. If one wishes an unique sole morality, that is to say an universal commandment, which all species may listen to, which they can follow in spirit and in letter, if one wishes in short to know the "aim of life" and the duty of the living, it is necessary, evidently, to find a formula which will totalize all the contradictions, break them and fuse them into a sole affirmation. There is but one, we may repeat it, without fear, and without allowing any objection: the aim of life is life's continuation.
