Note 14 — Chapter XIX · FABRE’S WRITINGS

And he adheres to it all the more strictly the more he sees it neglected by those about him, judging it to be of still greater importance for one who is seeking to know the insect, more advantageous to practice and speculation, more essential to the open-air life and the most abstruse inquiries of the human mind. By curiously interrogating the life of the insects one may render inestimable services to agriculture, as Pasteur did in his investigation of sericulture; one may also “furnish general psychology with data of inestimable value,” and this in particular was what he proposed to do. M. Fabre’s restless mind is for ever haunted by the most abstruse problems, which, indicated here and there, enable us to understand the motives that urge him on. With reference to these the insect is no longer an end: it becomes a means. Above all, M. Fabre wishes to define instinct; to establish the line of demarcation which divides it from intelligence, and to demonstrate whether human reason is an irreducible faculty or whether it is only a degree higher on a scale whose base descends into the depths of animality. More generally he propounds the question of the identity or the difference between the animal mind and the human. He also seeks to examine the problem of evolution; finally, to discover whether geometry rules over all things, and whether it tells us of a Universal Geometer, or whether “the strictly beautiful, the domain of reason, that is, order, is the inevitable result of a blind mechanism.”14