store—that their immortality was the immortality not of individual but of race; and suppose that thereupon they all struck and went forth to die each singly in their own way—would that moral emblem impress us, do you think, as a thing worthy of imitation or of praise?
But why (let us think) is the predication of such an event so impossible and so grotesque? Is it not because the life, the individual life of ant or bee is so impregnated with that instinct of communalism which gives the species its distinctive character, that it is impossible to sunder them, or to imagine the individual capable (while in the social milieu) of pursuing individual ends alone, after a following, over millions of years, of life in the communal form. Life, the thread of life which runs through them, is too much engrained with communism for separatist principles ever again to prevail.
And surely it is the same with man. Individualism, separatism, self-obsessionism, though still present in the phenomena of existence, are more and more subject to qualifications from which they cannot escape. And even the most evil form of individualism has to be parasitic or predatory; it cannot exist alone; even against its will it becomes conditioned by other lives. And the communal sense of man, implicit within the innumerable forms of life through which he has evolved, will continue to lay its hold on the parasitic and
