potentialities in its amorphous contours to lead it here into being bee and there into being giraffe. An evolution leading to such diverse results has interest only as a metaphysical idea, psychology can get from it next to nothing of value.

We must chuck the old ladder whose rungs the evolutionists ascended with such difficulty. We will imagine, metaphorically, a centre of life, with multiple lives diverging from it; having passed the unicellular phase, we will take no count of hypothetic subordinations. One does not wish to deny, one wishes rather not to deny, either general or particular evolutions, but the genealogies are too uncertain and the thread which unites them too often broken: what, for example, is the origin of birds, organisms which seem at once a progress and a retrogression from the mammifer? On reflection, one will consider the different love-mechanisms of all the dioicians as parallel and contemporary.

Man will then find himself in his proper and rather indistinct place in the crowd, beside the monkeys, rodents and bats. Psychologically, one must quite often compare him with insects, marvellous flowering of the life force. And what clarity from the process, lights showering in from all corners. Feminine coquetry, the flight before the male, the return, the game of yes and no, the uncertain attitude seeming at once cruel and amorous, and not peculiar to the female human? Not at all. Célimène is of all species, and heteroclite above all; she is both mole and spider, she is sparrow and cantharide, she is cricket and adder. A celebrated author in a play called, I think, La Fille Sauvage, represents feminine love as aggressive. An error! The female attacked by the male thinks always of retreat, she never, never attacks, save in certain species which appear to be very ancient and which have persisted to our time only by prodigies of equilibrium. Even there one must make reserves, for when one sees the female aggressive, it is perhaps at the second or fourth phase of the game, not at the beginning. The female sleeps until the male arouses her, then she gives in, plays, or takes flight. The virgin's reserve before man is but a very moderate bashfulness if compared with the pell-mell flight of a young mole intacta.

This is but one fact of a thousand. 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.

Belief in liberty has been born from the diversity of human aptitude, from man's power to reach the necessary termination of his activity by different routes, or to dodge this termination and suicide in himself the species whose future he bears. It, this liberty, is an illusion difficult not to have, an idea which one must shed if one wants to think in a manner not wholly irrational, but it is recompensingly certain that the multiplicity of possible activities is almost an equivalent of this liberty. Doubtless the strongest motive always wins, but today's stronger is tomorrow's weaker, hence a variety of human gaits feigning liberty, and practically resulting therein. Free will is only the faculty of being guided successively by a great number of different motives. When choice is possible, liberty begins, even though the chosen act is rigorously determined and when there is no possibility of avoiding it. Animals have a smaller liberty, restricted in proportion as their aptitudes are more limited; but when life begins liberty begins. The distinction, from this view-point, between man and animal is quantitative, and not qualitative. One must not be gulled by the scholastic distinction between instinct and intelligence; man is as full of instincts as the insect most visibly instinctive; he obeys them by methods more diverse, that is all there is to it.

If it is clear that man is an animal, it is also clear that he is a very complex one. One finds in him most of the aptitudes which are distributed one by one among beasts. There is hardly one of his habits, of his virtues, of his vices (to use the conventional terms) which can not be found either in an insect, a bird or a mammifer: monogamy, adultery, the "consequences"; polygamy, polyandry, lasciviousness, laziness, activity, cruelty, courage, devotion, any of these are common to animals, but each as the quality of an whole species. In the state of differentiation to which superior and cultivated human species have attained, each individual forms surely a separate variety determined by what is called, abstractly, "the character." This individual differentiation, very marked in mankind, is less marked in other animal species. Yet we note quite distinct characters in dogs, in horses and even in birds of the same race. It is quite probable that all bees have not the same character, since, for example, they are not all equally prompt to use their stings in analogous circumstances. Even there the difference between man and his brothers-in-life and in sensibility is but a difference of degree.

"Solidarity" is but an empty ideology if one limit it to human species. There is no abyss between man and animal; the two domains are separated by a tiny rivulet which a baby could step over. We are animals, we live on animals, and animals live on us. We both have and are parasites. We are predatory, and we are the living prey of the predatory. And when we follow the love act, it is truly, in the idiom of theologians, more bestiarum. Love is profoundly animal; therein is its beauty.

CHAPTER II

THE AIM OF LIFE

The importance of the sexual act.—Its ineluctable character.—Animals who live only to reproduce themselves.—The strife for love, and for death.—Females fecundated at the very instant of birth.—The maintenance of life.

What is life's aim? Its maintenance.

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 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. The abuse of thought, religious prejudices, vices sterilize a part of