Note 6 — Chapter I · THE SÉRIGNAN JUBILEE

For the moment we can no longer subscribe to the assertions of the learned Academician,6 nor to his fashion of writing history, which is decidedly too free. The truth is that Fabre, who delights in the pageant of the living world, does not always confine himself to recording it; he readily passes from the smallest details of observation to the wide purviews of reason, and he is at times as much a philosopher as a poet and a naturalist. The truth is that he often considers the question of the origins of life, and he answers it unequivocally like the believer that he is. It is enough to cite one passage among others, a passage which testifies to a brief uplifting of the heart that presupposes many others: “The eternal question, if one does not rise above the doctrine of dust to dust: how did the insect acquire so discerning an art?” And the following lines from the close of the same chapter: “The pill-maker’s work confronts the reflective mind with a serious problem. It offers us these alternatives: either we must grant the flattened cranium of the Dung-beetle the distinguished honour of having solved for itself the geometrical problem of the alimentary pill, or we must refer it to a harmony that governs all things beneath the eye of an Intelligence which, knowing all things, has provided for all?”7