Remy de Gourmont

“ To conceive some reality, one must conceive a rule, first, as an instrument of vision and of measure. With most insects the male does nothing but live; he deposits his seed in the female receptacle, flies on, vanishes. He does not share any of the labours preparatory to laying. Alone the female sphex engages in her terrible and clever strife with the cricket, whom she paralyzes with three stabs of her dagger in his three moto-nervous centres; alone she hollows the oblique burrow at the bottom of which live her larvæ; alone she adorns it, fills it with provisions, closes it. ”

“ Instinct will be slavery, subjection to custom; intelligence will represent liberty, that is to say, choice, acts which while being necessary, since they occur, have yet been determined by an ensemble of causes anterior to those which govern instinct. Intelligence will be the deep, the reserve, the spring which after long digging emerges between the rocks. In everything that intelligence suggests, the consciousness of the species makes a departure; what is useful is incorporated in instinct, enlarging and diversifying it ”

“ 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 sitaris. 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. ”

“ The female of the rock-cock of Brazil is tawny and without beauty, the male is yellow-orange, with crest bordered in deep red, the long wing feathers and tail feathers are red-brown. One sees the females ranged in a circle as a crowd about jugglers, the males are strutting, cutting capers, moving their colour-shot feathers, getting themselves admired and desired. From time to time a female admits that she is moved, a couple is formed. But the tetras, heather-cocks of North America, have still more curious customs. Their fights have become exactly what they have with us, that is, dances. ”

“ A male leaps on a female and is going to couple. The female turns her head, stares at the intruder, and decapitates him with a blow of her jaw-foot, a marvellous toothed-scythe. Without disconcertion the male, wedges up, spreads himself, makes love as if nothing abnormal had happened. The mating took place, and the female had the patience to wait for the end of the operation before finishing her wedding breakfast.
The headless nuptials are explained by the fact that the insects' brain does not seem to have unique control of its movements; these animals can live without the cervical ganglion. ”

“ I believe, and on no better ground than that of a sudden emotion, that the change of species is not a slow matter, managed by cross-breeding, of nature's leporides and bardots, I believe that the species changes as suddenly as a man makes a song or a poem, or as suddenly as he starts making them, more suddenly than he can cut a statue in stone, at most as slowly as a locust or long-tailed Sirmione false mosquito emerges from its outgrown skin. It is not even proved that man is at the end of his physical changes. ”

“ The break-away is sudden, a jump. Still more tender are the courtships of the leaping spider; they advance by little rushes, stop, watch, leap on their prey, insect or fly, or else float at the wind's will on the end of a long hanging web-thread. When male and female meet, they approach, tap each other with forefeet and tentacles, separate, reapproach, recommence. After a thousand salutations, they pose head to head, the male climbs onto the female, stretches out until he reaches the abdomen. Then he lifts the extremity of it, applies his palpe to the vulva, and retires. ”

“ 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." ”

“ It is necessary that the couple reproduce a certain number of beings, equals of the unities of which itself is formed: all means are good which attain this end, and which attain it most speedily and most surely. Nature who is pitiless, is also in a hurry. Her imagination, always active, invents, ceaselessly, new forms which she casts into life, in measure as the earlier born finish their cycle. ”

“ There is not one way of instinctive man with a maid which is not findable in one or other animal species; this is perfectly comprehensible seeing that man is an animal, submitted to the essential instincts which govern all animality; there being everywhere the same matter animate with the same desire: to live, to perpetuate life. Man's superiority is in the immense diversity of his aptitudes. Animals are confined to one series of gestures, always the same ones, man varies his mimicry without limit; but the target is the same, and the result is the same, copulation, fecundation and eggs. ”

“ Nature is neither good, nor evil, nor altruist, nor egoist; she is an ensemble of forces whereof none cedes save under superior pressure. Her conscience is that of a balance; being of a perfect indifference, it is of an absolute equity. But the sensibility of a balance is of a single order, single dimension; the sensibility of nature is infinite, to all actions and reactions. Whether the strong devour the weak, or the weak the strong, there is no compensation save in our human illusion ”

“ Philosophers have believed that sexual modesty was an artificial sentiment, fruit of civilizations: they did not know the mole's story, or any of the true stories in nature, for nearly all females are timorous, nearly all react, at the appearance of the male, in fear or in flight. Our virtues are never more than psychological tendencies, and the finest of them are those whose explanation we are forbidden to seek. Why is the she-bat violent, the she-mole timorous? Without doubt the she-mole observes the rule, even in exaggerating its severity, but why the rule? ”

“ Woman's liberty also accentuates the dimorphism but by another process. Freed from the bridle of necessity, from the need of pleasing, woman escaped from the couple, exaggerates her feminism, she becomes again the female in excess, since it is in being more and more female that she has most chances of seducing the male, who is insensible to all other merit. And, inversely, a woman having man's education is, given equal beauty, less than any other a seductress. ”

“ Coupling is nearly always a grimace. One would say that nature has set the male organ here, and the female there, and left to specific ingenuity the care of effecting the junction.
It is, I think, permitted us to conclude from the mediocre fitness of animals to milieu, and of organs to acts, that it is not the milieu which absolutely fashions, or the organs which absolutely govern, the acts. One then feels oneself inclined to reaccept Bonald's definition of man, and even to find it admirable, just, and strict: An intelligence served by organs. ”

“ 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 death-flight, the female feverishly hollows the house of her offspring, partitions it, stores the honey for the larvæ, lays, whirls for an instant and dies. ”

“ 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 manœuvre 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. ”

“ In many hymenoptera only the female carries the sword, as in the case of the gilded wasp, gold-striped over blue or red, who can project a long needle from her abdomen; the female philanthe, who is carnivorous, while the puerile unarmed male lives upon flower-pollen. Not disdaining this natural dessert, the female philanthe will attack the nectar-loaded bee with her great dart, stab him and pump out his crop. One may see the ferocious small animal knead the dead bee for half an hour, squeeze him like a lemon, drink him out like a gourd. ”

“ In most animal species coition is but a prelude to death, and often love and death work their supreme act in the same instant. Copulation of insects is suicide: would it be reasonable to consider it as produced by a desire to die? One must dissociate the idea of pleasure and the idea of love, if one wants to understand anything of the tragic movements which perpetually beget life at the expense of life itself. Pleasure explains nothing. People might simply be commanded to die as a means of reproduction, they would obey with the same eagerness: this is observed even in humanity. ”

“ Thought is a "chemical process" in relation to the organ, the brain; creative thought is act like fecundation, like the male cast of the human seed, but given that cast, that ejaculation, I am perfectly willing to grant that the thought once born, separated, in regard to itself, not in relation to the brain that begat it, does lead an independent life much like a member of the vegetable kingdom, blowing seeds, ideas from the paradisal garden at the summit of Dante's Mount Purgatory, capable of lodging and sprouting where they fall. ”

“ It is difficult to know whether animals have consciousness, and it is perhaps useless, unless at least, one admit that this candle, by its luminous or calorific rays, does, as M. Fouillée teaches, affect the march of the mechanism. In sum, consciousness also is a fact, and no fact dies without consequences; there are neither first causes nor last causes. In any case one will, since it is evident, cling to one statement that even if consciousness is a possible reactive, intelligence can act without it: the most conscious of men have phases of unconscious intellectuality ”

“ One sees him flying over the nopals, then suddenly alighting on a female, who resembles a fat wood-louse round and puffy, twice as stout as the male, wingless. Glued by her feet to a branch, with her proboscis stuck into it, continually pumping sap, she looks like a fruit, like an oak-apple or oak-gall on a peduncle for which reason Réaumur called her picturesquely the gall-insect. In certain species of cocides the male is so small that his proportion is that of an ant strolling over a peach. ”

“ But other cases of animal's instinct joining with free intelligence, give examples of human sagacity. We have seen these same mason bees and xylocopes and domestic bees profit eagerly by a nest ready made, by a hole bored in wood, by artificial combs set ready to take their honey; the osmies, who lay in the stalks of cut reeds, in which they arrange a series of chambers, accommodated themselves under Fabre's guidance in glass tubes which permitted the great observer to know them intimately. Instinct is by turns as stupid as a machine and as intelligent as a brain ”

“ The males do not know possession nor the females surrender, no touch, no rubbings, no caress. The object of male desire is not the female but the eggs, he watches for those she is about to lay, he searches for those she has laid, an excitement quite like those produced by onanism, or which are engendered by fetishism in certain distorted minds and which operate at the sight of a slipper or ribbon, and die down, even to frigidity in the presence of the woman herself. ”

“ What makes woman the more beautiful is the invisibility of her genital organs. The male organ, which is sometimes an advantage, is always a load, and always a blemish; it is made for the race, not for the individual. In the male human, and precisely because of its erect attitude, the sex is the sensitive point par excellence, and the visible point, it is the point of attack in hand to hand struggle, point of aim for the jet, obstacle for the eye, be it as a roughness of surface, be it as a break in the middle of the line. ”

“ A hen teaches her chick to scratch for worms (it is true that she does not teach her ducklings to dabble in puddles, and they are her despair, to our amusement) , an osmie can teach its young nothing. Yet now osmies do exactly what their ancients have done. The insect opens its shell, brushes its antennæ, performs its toilet, opens its wings, flies off for life, moves without hesitation toward the pasture it needs, recognizes and flees the enemies of its race, makes love, and finally constructs a nest identical with the cradle from which it has emerged. ”

“ In love everything is just, everything is noble, as soon as, among the maddest animals, it is a play moved by the desire of creating. It is more difficult doubtless to justify fantasies which are merely for the purpose of avoiding trouble, especially if one allow oneself to be blinded by the idea of specific finality; one may however affirm, and one will say nothing more about the matter, that animals are not ignorant either of sodomy or of onanism and that they cede to them by necessity, in the absence of females. Sénancour has written wise and bold pages upon these practices among humans. ”

“ One can not say that the mother bee is a true queen, a veritable chief, but she is the important personage in the hive, the one without whom life stops. The workers have the air of being mistresses; in reality their nervous centre is in the queen; they act only for her, and by her. Her disappearance sets the hive crazy, and drives it to absurd endeavours, such as the transformation of a nurse into a layer, though she will give eggs of one sex only, so many useless mouths. ”

“ The larvæ of the sphex, another wasp, are fed on live crickets that have been paralyzed by a stab. As soon as it hatches the larva attacks the cricket in the belly at the chosen spot where the egg has been layed. The poor insect protests by feeble movements of antennæ, and mandibles: in vain; he is eaten alive, fibre by fibre, by a great worm which gnaws his entrails, and with so great a skill that it begins on the parts not essential to life, and thus keeps the prey fresh and tasty to the last. Such is the gentleness of nature, the good mother. ”