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The Life of the Bee

"Let us sit on these sheaves," he continued, "and look again. Let us reject not a single one of the little facts that build up the reality of which I have spoken. Let us permit them to depart of their own accord into space. They cumber the foreground, and yet we cannot but be aware of the existence behind them of a great and very curious force that sustains the whole. Does it only sustain and not raise? These men whom we see before us are at least no longer the ferocious animals of whom La Bruyère speaks, the wretches who talked in a kind of inarticulate voice, and withdrew at night to their dens, where they lived on black bread, water, and roots.

"The race, you will tell me, is neither as strong nor as healthy. That may be; 338