The subconscious13 popular instinct against Darwinism was not a mere14 offense15 at the grotesque16 notion of visiting one’s grandfather in a cage in the Regent’s Park. Men go in for drink, practical jokes and many other grotesque things; they do not much mind making beasts of themselves, and would not much mind having beasts made of their forefathers17. The real instinct was much deeper and much more valuable. It was this: that when once one begins to think of man as a shifting and alterable thing, it is always easy for the strong and crafty18 to twist him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural19 purposes. The popular instinct sees in such developments the possibility of backs bowed and hunch-backed for their burden, or limbs twisted for their task. It has a very well-grounded guess that whatever is done swiftly and systematically20 will mostly be done by a successful class and almost solely21 in their interests. It has therefore a vision of inhuman22 hybrids23 and half-human experiments much in the style of Mr. Wells’s “Island of Dr. Moreau.” The rich man may come to breeding a tribe of dwarfs24 to be his jockeys, and a tribe of giants to be his hall-porters. Grooms25 might be born bow-legged and tailors born cross-legged; perfumers might have long, large noses and a crouching26 attitude, like hounds of scent27; and professional wine-tasters might have the horrible expression of one tasting wine stamped upon their faces as infants. Whatever wild image one employs it cannot keep pace with the panic of the human fancy, when once it supposes that the fixed28 type called man could be changed. If some millionaire wanted arms, some porter must grow ten arms like an octopus29; if he wants legs, some messenger-boy must go with a hundred trotting30 legs like a centipede. In the distorted mirror of hypothesis, that is, of the unknown, men can dimly see such monstrous31 and evil shapes; men run all to eye, or all to fingers, with nothing left but one nostril32 or one ear. That is the nightmare with which the mere notion of adaptation threatens us. That is the nightmare that is not so very far from the reality.
It will be said that not the wildest evolutionist really asks that we should become in any way unhuman or copy any other animal. Pardon me, that is exactly what not merely the wildest evolutionists urge, but some of the tamest evolutionists too. There has risen high in recent history an important cultus which bids fair to be the religion of the future—which means the religion of those few weak-minded people who live in the future. It is typical of our time that it has to look for its god through a microscope; and our time has marked a definite adoration33 of the insect. Like most things we call new, of course, it is not at all new as an idea; it is only new as an idolatry. Virgil takes bees seriously but I doubt if he would have kept bees as carefully as he wrote about them. The wise king told the sluggard35 to watch the ant, a charming occupation—for a sluggard. But in our own time has appeared a very different tone, and more than one great man, as well as numberless intelligent men, have in our time seriously suggested that we should study the insect because we are his inferiors. The old moralists merely took the virtues36 of man and distributed them quite decoratively37 and arbitrarily among the animals. The ant was an almost heraldic symbol of industry, as the lion was of courage, or, for the matter of that, the pelican38 of charity. But if the mediaevals had been convinced that a lion was not courageous39, they would have dropped the lion and kept the courage; if the pelican is not charitable, they would say, so much the worse for the pelican. The old moralists, I say, permitted the ant to enforce and typify man’s morality; they never allowed the ant to upset it. They used the ant for industry as the lark40 for punctuality; they looked up at the flapping birds and down at the crawling insects for a homely41 lesson. But we have lived to see a sect34 that does not look down at the insects, but looks up at the insects, that asks us essentially to bow down and worship beetles42, like ancient Egyptians.
Maurice Maeterlinck is a man of unmistakable genius, and genius always carries a magnifying glass. In the terrible crystal of his lens we have seen the bees not as a little yellow swarm43, but rather in golden armies and hierarchies44 of warriors45 and queens. Imagination perpetually peers and creeps further down the avenues and vistas46 in the tubes of science, and one fancies every frantic47 reversal of proportions; the earwig striding across the echoing plain like an elephant, or the grasshopper48 coming roaring above our roofs like a vast aeroplane, as he leaps from Hertfordshire to Surrey. One seems to enter in a dream a temple of enormous entomology, whose architecture is based on something wilder than arms or backbones49; in which the ribbed columns have the half-crawling look of dim and monstrous caterpillars52; or the dome53 is a starry54 spider hung horribly in the void. There is one of the modern works of engineering that gives one something of this nameless fear of the exaggerations of an underworld; and that is the curious curved architecture of the under ground railway, commonly called the Twopenny Tube. Those squat55 archways, without any upright line or pillar, look as if they had been tunneled by huge worms who have never learned to lift their heads. It is the very underground palace of the Serpent, the spirit of changing shape and color, that is the enemy of man.
But it is not merely by such strange aesthetic56 suggestions that writers like Maeterlinck have influenced us in the matter; there is also an ethical57 side to the business. The upshot of M. Maeterlinck’s book on bees is an admiration58, one might also say an envy, of their collective spirituality; of the fact that they live only for something which he calls the Soul of the Hive. And this admiration for the communal59 morality of insects is expressed in many other modern writers in various quarters and shapes; in Mr. Benjamin Kidd’s theory of living only for the evolutionary60 future of our race, and in the great interest of some Socialists61 in ants, which they generally prefer to bees, I suppose, because they are not so brightly colored. Not least among the hundred evidences of this vague insectolatry are the floods of flattery poured by modern people on that energetic nation of the Far East of which it has been said that “Patriotism62 is its only religion”; or, in other words, that it lives only for the Soul of the Hive. When at long intervals63 of the centuries Christendom grows weak, morbid64 or skeptical65, and mysterious Asia begins to move against us her dim populations and to pour them westward66 like a dark movement of matter, in such cases it has been very common to compare the invasion to a plague of lice or incessant67 armies of locusts69. The Eastern armies were indeed like insects; in their blind, busy destructiveness, in their black nihilism of personal outlook, in their hateful indifference70 to individual life and love, in their base belief in mere numbers, in their pessimistic courage and their atheistic patriotism, the riders and raiders of the East are indeed like all the creeping things of the earth. But never before, I think, have Christians71 called a Turk a locust68 and meant it as a compliment. Now for the first time we worship as well as fear; and trace with adoration that enormous form advancing vast and vague out of Asia, faintly discernible amid the mystic clouds of winged creatures hung over the wasted lands, thronging72 the skies like thunder and discoloring the skies like rain; Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies.
In resisting this horrible theory of the Soul of the Hive, we of Christendom stand not for ourselves, but for all humanity; for the essential and distinctive73 human idea that one good and happy man is an end in himself, that a soul is worth saving. Nay74, for those who like such biological fancies it might well be said that we stand as chiefs and champions of a whole section of nature, princes of the house whose cognizance is the backbone50, standing for the milk of the individual mother and the courage of the wandering cub75, representing the pathetic chivalry76 of the dog, the humor and perversity77 of cats, the affection of the tranquil78 horse, the loneliness of the lion. It is more to the point, however, to urge that this mere glorification79 of society as it is in the social insects is a transformation80 and a dissolution in one of the outlines which have been specially81 the symbols of man. In the cloud and confusion of the flies and bees is growing fainter and fainter, as is finally disappearing, the idea of the human family. The hive has become larger than the house, the bees are destroying their captors; what the locust hath left, the caterpillar51 hath eaten; and the little house and garden of our friend Jones is in a bad way.
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1 distress | |
n.苦恼,痛苦,不舒适;不幸;vt.使悲痛 | |
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2 atheist | |
n.无神论者 | |
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3 atheistic | |
adj.无神论者的 | |
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4 doctrine | |
n.教义;主义;学说 | |
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5 tyrant | |
n.暴君,专制的君主,残暴的人 | |
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6 profess | |
v.声称,冒称,以...为业,正式接受入教,表明信仰 | |
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7 monarchy | |
n.君主,最高统治者;君主政体,君主国 | |
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8 snobs | |
(谄上傲下的)势利小人( snob的名词复数 ); 自高自大者,自命不凡者 | |
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9 pious | |
adj.虔诚的;道貌岸然的 | |
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10 essentially | |
adv.本质上,实质上,基本上 | |
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11 standing | |
n.持续,地位;adj.永久的,不动的,直立的,不流动的 | |
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12 draught | |
n.拉,牵引,拖;一网(饮,吸,阵);顿服药量,通风;v.起草,设计 | |
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13 subconscious | |
n./adj.潜意识(的),下意识(的) | |
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14 mere | |
adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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15 offense | |
n.犯规,违法行为;冒犯,得罪 | |
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16 grotesque | |
adj.怪诞的,丑陋的;n.怪诞的图案,怪人(物) | |
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17 forefathers | |
n.祖先,先人;祖先,祖宗( forefather的名词复数 );列祖列宗;前人 | |
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18 crafty | |
adj.狡猾的,诡诈的 | |
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19 unnatural | |
adj.不自然的;反常的 | |
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20 systematically | |
adv.有系统地 | |
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21 solely | |
adv.仅仅,唯一地 | |
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22 inhuman | |
adj.残忍的,不人道的,无人性的 | |
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23 hybrids | |
n.杂交生成的生物体( hybrid的名词复数 );杂交植物(或动物);杂种;(不同事物的)混合物 | |
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24 dwarfs | |
n.侏儒,矮子(dwarf的复数形式)vt.(使)显得矮小(dwarf的第三人称单数形式) | |
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25 grooms | |
n.新郎( groom的名词复数 );马夫v.照料或梳洗(马等)( groom的第三人称单数 );使做好准备;训练;(给动物)擦洗 | |
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26 crouching | |
v.屈膝,蹲伏( crouch的现在分词 ) | |
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27 scent | |
n.气味,香味,香水,线索,嗅觉;v.嗅,发觉 | |
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28 fixed | |
adj.固定的,不变的,准备好的;(计算机)固定的 | |
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29 octopus | |
n.章鱼 | |
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30 trotting | |
小跑,急走( trot的现在分词 ); 匆匆忙忙地走 | |
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31 monstrous | |
adj.巨大的;恐怖的;可耻的,丢脸的 | |
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32 nostril | |
n.鼻孔 | |
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33 adoration | |
n.爱慕,崇拜 | |
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34 sect | |
n.派别,宗教,学派,派系 | |
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35 sluggard | |
n.懒人;adj.懒惰的 | |
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36 virtues | |
美德( virtue的名词复数 ); 德行; 优点; 长处 | |
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37 decoratively | |
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38 pelican | |
n.鹈鹕,伽蓝鸟 | |
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39 courageous | |
adj.勇敢的,有胆量的 | |
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40 lark | |
n.云雀,百灵鸟;n.嬉戏,玩笑;vi.嬉戏 | |
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41 homely | |
adj.家常的,简朴的;不漂亮的 | |
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42 beetles | |
n.甲虫( beetle的名词复数 ) | |
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43 swarm | |
n.(昆虫)等一大群;vi.成群飞舞;蜂拥而入 | |
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44 hierarchies | |
等级制度( hierarchy的名词复数 ); 统治集团; 领导层; 层次体系 | |
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45 warriors | |
武士,勇士,战士( warrior的名词复数 ) | |
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46 vistas | |
长条形景色( vista的名词复数 ); 回顾; 展望; (未来可能发生的)一系列情景 | |
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47 frantic | |
adj.狂乱的,错乱的,激昂的 | |
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48 grasshopper | |
n.蚱蜢,蝗虫,蚂蚱 | |
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49 backbones | |
n.骨干( backbone的名词复数 );脊骨;骨气;脊骨状物 | |
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50 backbone | |
n.脊骨,脊柱,骨干;刚毅,骨气 | |
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51 caterpillar | |
n.毛虫,蝴蝶的幼虫 | |
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52 caterpillars | |
n.毛虫( caterpillar的名词复数 );履带 | |
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53 dome | |
n.圆屋顶,拱顶 | |
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54 starry | |
adj.星光照耀的, 闪亮的 | |
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55 squat | |
v.蹲坐,蹲下;n.蹲下;adj.矮胖的,粗矮的 | |
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56 aesthetic | |
adj.美学的,审美的,有美感 | |
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57 ethical | |
adj.伦理的,道德的,合乎道德的 | |
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58 admiration | |
n.钦佩,赞美,羡慕 | |
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59 communal | |
adj.公有的,公共的,公社的,公社制的 | |
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60 evolutionary | |
adj.进化的;演化的,演变的;[生]进化论的 | |
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61 socialists | |
社会主义者( socialist的名词复数 ) | |
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62 patriotism | |
n.爱国精神,爱国心,爱国主义 | |
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63 intervals | |
n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 );间隔时间;[数学]区间;(戏剧、电影或音乐会的)幕间休息 | |
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64 morbid | |
adj.病的;致病的;病态的;可怕的 | |
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65 skeptical | |
adj.怀疑的,多疑的 | |
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66 westward | |
n.西方,西部;adj.西方的,向西的;adv.向西 | |
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67 incessant | |
adj.不停的,连续的 | |
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68 locust | |
n.蝗虫;洋槐,刺槐 | |
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69 locusts | |
n.蝗虫( locust的名词复数 );贪吃的人;破坏者;槐树 | |
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70 indifference | |
n.不感兴趣,不关心,冷淡,不在乎 | |
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71 Christians | |
n.基督教徒( Christian的名词复数 ) | |
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72 thronging | |
v.成群,挤满( throng的现在分词 ) | |
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73 distinctive | |
adj.特别的,有特色的,与众不同的 | |
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74 nay | |
adv.不;n.反对票,投反对票者 | |
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75 cub | |
n.幼兽,年轻无经验的人 | |
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76 chivalry | |
n.骑士气概,侠义;(男人)对女人彬彬有礼,献殷勤 | |
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77 perversity | |
n.任性;刚愎自用 | |
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78 tranquil | |
adj. 安静的, 宁静的, 稳定的, 不变的 | |
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79 glorification | |
n.赞颂 | |
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80 transformation | |
n.变化;改造;转变 | |
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81 specially | |
adv.特定地;特殊地;明确地 | |
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