s the knowledge
of the hymenoptera in terms of intelligence. It is this that compels us
to compare the Ammophila with the entomologist, who knows the
caterpillar as he knows everything else--from the outside, and without
having on his part a special or vital interest. The Ammophila, we
imagine, must learn, one by one, like the entomologist, the positions of
the nerve-centres of the caterpillar--must acquire at least the
practical knowledge of these positions by trying the effects of its
sting. But there is no need for such a view if we suppose a _sympathy_
(in the etymological sense of the word) between the Ammophila and its
victim, which teaches it from within, so to say, concerning the
vulnerability of the caterpillar. This feeling of vulnerability might
owe nothing to outward perception, but result from the mere presence
together of the Ammophila and the caterpillar, considered no longer as
two organisms, but as two activities. It would express, in a concrete
form, the _relation_ of the one to the other. Certainly, a scientific
theory cannot appeal to considerations of this kind. It must not put
action before organization, sympathy before perception and knowledge.
But, once more, either philosophy has nothing to see here, or its role
begins where that of science ends.

Whether it makes instinct a "compound reflex," or a habit formed
intelligently that has become automatism, or a sum of small accidental
advantages accumulated and fixed by selection, in every case science
claims to resolve instinct completely either into _intelligent_ actions,
or into mechanisms built up piece by piece like those combined by our
_intelligence_. I agree indeed that science is here within its function.
It gives us, in default of a real analysis of the object, a translation
of this object in terms of intelligence. But is it not plain that
science itself invites philosophy to consider things in another way? If
our biology was still that of Aristotle, if it regarded the series of
living beings as unilinear, if it showed us the whole of life evolving
towards intelligence and passing, to that end, through sensibility and
instinct, we should be right, we, the intelligent beings, in turning
back towards the earlier and consequently inferior manifestations of
life and in claiming to fit them, without deforming them, into the molds
of our understanding. But one of the clearest results of biology has
been to show that evolution has taken place alo