Page:Insects - Their Ways and Means of Living.djvu/159



mal's way of living." And still, our morality will analyze into the same two elements; our acts are right or wrong according as they are appropriate or non-appropriate to out way of living. The difference between human actions and those of other animais is not essentially in the acts themselves, but in the methods by which they are brought about. Animais are controlled by instincts, mostly; man is controlled by a conscious feeling that he should do this or that--"con- science," we call it--and his specific actions are the result of his reasoning or teaching as to what is right and what is wrong, excepting, of course, the acts of perverted indi- viduals who lack either a functional conscience or a well- adjusted power of reason, or of individuals in whom the instincts of an earlier way of living are still strong. The general truth is clear, however, that in behavior, as in physiology, there is not just one way of arriving at a common result, and that nature may employ quite dif- ferent means for determining and activating conduct in her creatures. Since right and wrong, then, are hOt abstract prop- erties, but are terres expressing fitness or non-fitness, judged according to circumstances, or an animal's way of living, it is evident that the quality of actions will differ much according to how a species lires. Particularly will there be a difference in the necessary behavior of species that lire as individuals and of those that lire as groups of individuals. In other words, that which may be right for an individualistic species may be wrong for a communal species; for, with the latter, the group re- places the individual, and relations are now established within the group, or pertaining to the group as a whole, that before applied to the individual, while relations that formerly existed between individuals become now rela- tions between groups. The mority of animais live as individuals, each wandering here and there, wherever its fancy leads or

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