The divergent streams of that primaeval fountain of life as they spread out upon the earth, in the earth, in the air, in, under and upon the waters, have given to it the endless variety of its creatures. In this variety, and of those streams, there are three and no more than three main currents; there are three directions and grouped characters and qualities of life. Each of these in its turn branches into minor streams and differences of creatures. The main currents are those of the plants, the insects, and the vertebrate animals.

We have seen that one function of the life of plants gives to the whole world of living creatures access to the energy of the sun. Yet as regards intelligence and conscious relation with other creatures the plant may be said to be asleep; it carries on its vital functions and builds up its manifold and admirable structures, working as though in sleep. Its whole activity, varied though it be, is like that of a dreamer. Confined within a wall of cellulose, the plant-cell works out its life as though, for its awareness, no other creature lived.

With the insect-world we enter on a widely differing scene. There, in the highest insects, we discover what may well rouse a salutary discontent with ourselves. The life-current which finds its eddying termination in the wasps and bees and ants has one, and that its chief, character pointing to grave but happily not irremediable deficiency in most of us, if not to some extent in all. The wasp seems to know other creatures' life, to understand it sympathetically, to touch and feel it from within, in a manner that to us is marvellous. Life manifests through this little winged thing a power we call instinct, perfected for certain uses to a degree not attained outside the insect-world. There are wasps which sting caterpillars with admirable though not invariable precision in their nerve-centres, so that they go on living but cannot move, and thus are made to serve as living larders for the wasp-grubs. Observers have found that different wasps, seeking different kinds of prey, sting three times, nine times, in three or nine centres, according to the number in the body of their selected victim, and that the Scolia stings the larvae of the rose-beetle in one point only, just where the motor-ganglia are concentrated. Other observers have noticed some failures and occasional irregularities. But listen (it may be once more and after many times) to this well-known story, the story of the Sitaris, if you want to see what life can do in a fashion for which the intellectual work of man offers in his experience no parallel. This tiny beetle lays its eggs in the doorway of the underground passages dug by a certain bee, the Anthophora. When an egg is hatched the grub awaits an opportunity to spring upon the male bee as it comes out. You may deceive it with a substitute, and no doubt it often is deceived without your help. Nevertheless, if not thus deceived it clings to the bee until the nuptial flight occurs, when it seizes some chance of shifting from the male to the female. Now clinging to the female, it waits until the bee-eggs are as usual laid upon honey. Then it leaps again, this time upon an egg which serves it at first as a raft on the honey. By degrees it eats up the egg; then uses as its raft the empty shell. It changes, undergoes a metamorphosis, and becomes able both to float and feed on honey, where it remains until it changes for the last time into the perfect insect, a Sitaris ready in its turn to set going this amazing cycle of life. It is a life that seems to involve knowledge of things which, by any knowing such as our intellectual experience provides, could not be known. Untaught, unaided, without previous experiment, the creature displays what looks like, but cannot be, true forethought, as well as ingenuity and adaptive skill; what looks like, but cannot be, a continued adjustment of reflectively chosen means to reflectively recognized ends. There can be no question but that all this, under such conditions, would be beyond the reach of our intellectual powers, and beyond our reflective thought. We may justly say that it is beyond the reach of any powers that are merely of reflective thought. Not thus does intellect carry on its conceptual work. It analyses and reflects, it separates, compares, and puts together. That is not the way of the grub of Sitaris, neither is it the way of the solitary wasp. There appears to be for these and for others of their tribe, in 'perceptual consciousness,' some mysterious sympathy between the life of the creature using and the life of the creature used, akin to that sympathy of digestive secretions with digestible food by means of which our bodies are nourished, or the process by which the cell becomes the organized and completed creature. There seem to be also motor-habits stored up by repetition in forbears, which facilitate the active expression of this sympathy. When the wasp stings the nerve-centres of the caterpillar as accurately, as on the whole he does, it seems to us as though in the mere presence together of wasp and caterpillar two congruous activities, not two beings, met—the wasp-activity perceiving rather than thinking about the caterpillar-activity, perceiving it and attacking it through certain established instrumental means as though entering into a familiar relation to it. You might be inclined to say that the sting of the wasp picks out the nervous ganglia of the caterpillar as a magnet picks out fragments of steel from the dust. Instinct no doubt means perceiving in sympathetic relation, and has more than a mere likeness to reflex actions in the body. Like these it may find its bodily support in a motor tradition, borne from reproductive germ to reproductive germ, as a structural record of bodily movements ingrained by the incessant repetition of certain actions through many continuous generations. But unlike these it may work with and for the intellect in all its grades.

We may well desire a sympathetic relation with other life, a perceptive understanding keener, quicker, more direct, more inclusive and more penetrating. And let us hasten to assure ourselves that we may attain what we seek, though in ways very different from the insect's, and for ends very different too. No life-current in any creature is of one character alone; none but has in it, in some proportion or another and with this or that degree of emphasis, all characters. The intuitive character and power of life in perceptive experience and perceptive consciousness, which though highly emphasized in some creatures becomes narrowed to their instinct, is not the exclusive prerogative of any one kind, even of the insects, though within their narrow bounds they have carried it almost to inerrancy of use; any more than reflective thought is the exclusive prerogative of man, though he has carried it farther and wider and deeper than any other creature of the earth. The problem for us is in great part one of emphasis and proportion. We have cultivated our reflective thinking more than our perceptive awareness, our conceptual more than our intuitive power. Because thought exercised upon external things has given us what we most wanted in the external world, and is giving us more and more, we have over-emphasized it. We have strained unceasingly to understand and to manage not life but those external material things. We are great geometers and artificers; we are great in our understanding of material things; but there is another greatness, a perceptual greatness, to which most of us have not attained, although it lies open to us, in fulness matching the fulness of our intellectual endowment.

We are not without plain indications of the existence in ourselves of that intuitive power, which as instinct is amazing to us in the accurate yet constrained lives of the beetles and the wasps. It is amazing chiefly because it is not that which we desire and are aware of desiring or needing to use. There is in every one of us, latent or declared, a true intuition of life, a truly intuitive awareness, a touch within, a perceptual knowledge sympathetic in the pure sense of the word, reaching far beyond the insect's. We may know it for what it is because in us giving rather than gaining is its secret spring, although gain, assuredly, comes by giving. Such, for example, is the knowledge of the artist, won only in his giving of himself to the object of his worship, in his placing himself by an artistic sympathy within it. Thus he obtains by sympathetic intuition an understanding that is like a spiritual touch, that is perceiving not thinking about, that, by immediate contact with the individual thing, is a knowledge of it in its own reality. Such again is the intuition of the true lover, who gives himself to the beloved and in that giving wins a knowledge like the artist's. They are akin, these two, artist and lover. Their kinship is grounded in their use of that intuitive character of life which for humanity as a whole has been cast into the shade by the more practically useful manners of intellect, and which in the insect-tribe is confined to the immediate needs of a fixed and narrow mode of existence.

Yet there is in truth a real difference, in these respects, between man and the insect or any other creature. In the perceptive consciousness of the insect, restricted by the fixed character of its nervous system, the intuitive potency of life has shrunk and hardened, as it were, into a restrained power which deals, and can deal, only with a very small part of life and the world. This power is forced to work in the windowless prison of a completed life. Man's life is not completed; in him consciousness, stretching out ever farther and farther, has passed one temporary limit after another, function impelling structure to match itself, mind seeking to go beyond itself. The consciousness of man has been always opening up for him new fields, adapting itself to new objects, moving among them, making a way through them, and in all its growth and change advancing in freedom. To attain this freed human consciousness seems, we may say, the motive principle of the evolution of life through man's forerunners. Its driving impulse is both carried indefinitely further in that consciousness and revealed as what it really is. Herein lies the difference in order between every animal, every plant, the most skilful of the beetles or the wasps, and man. Their way is closed. His lies before him wide open. He is the open way, the one open way on earth for life in its harmony of intuitive and intellectual power both fulfilled. And if hitherto we and our forefathers have in practice over-emphasized conceptual thinking and the intellect, our over-emphasis and its practical results have set us in a place where sympathetic intuition in perceptive experience has a new advantage. In us it will not, or rather it need not, be narrowed down. It may stretch out into every field that discursive and reflective thought has opened up, and it may pass beyond them to lead them on. The attainment by man of his high calling and of the destiny of which he is capable depends in truth on this expansion of his life. So the philosopher assures us. So, also—and this is noteworthy—does the psychologist: 'with the development of "psychical integration" both sides develop, and their relation, that is experience, therefore expands into a meaning inclusive of more and more, till, in the human being, it may be inclusive of all things actual and possible, the universe in space, and history in time from the remotest past, and, in imagination, to the most distant future.' The psychologist too, is not without his vision.