These transferences raised another problem. Would the returning individual be recognized by the others? Apparently he is. Generally speaking, great excitement is to be seen in the nest when the absent one reappears. The others place their arms around him, and sometimes even place their lips on his. In certain cases, however, the feelings manifested appeared to be those of rage or displeasure.
The first experiments showed that some instinct enables Men to recognize their own manheaps. The second problem to which we turned was to find out whether, among these creatures, there existed sentiments akin to those of Uranians, and whether, for instance, conjugal or maternal love could exist on the Earth. Such an hypothesis struck me as absurd; it attributed to the Earth Dweller refinements of feeling which the Uranian has attained only through millions of years of civilization. But the duty of the experimental scientist is to approach his subject with an open mind, and to make all his experiments without any prejudice regarding their outcome.
At night the male Earth Dweller generally rests beside his female. I asked my pupils to bisect some nests in such a way as to separate the male from the female without injuring either, and then to join up one half of Nest A with the half of Nest B, observing whether the little animals took notice of the change. For the experiment to be carried out under normal conditions, it was essential that the selected nests should closely resemble each other; and for this reason I instructed my collaborators to select two nests containing cells of the same size and broods with the same number of young. E.X. 33 showed me, not without pride, two almost identical nests in the “Mad Manheap” und the “Rigid Manheap,” each of them containing a couple with four little ones. The bisection of the houses, and their transportation, were carried out with admirable skill by E.X. 33, and the results were conclusive. In both cases I he couples thus artificially put together by us showed slight surprise at the moment of waking, adequately accounted for by the movement and shock. Then, in both cases, they remained together with no attempt at flight, and in apparently normal attitudes. An almost incredible fact was that, from the very first moment, each of the two females tended the other’s brood with no sign of horror or distaste. They were plainly incapable of realizing that they were not dealing with their own offspring.
This experiment was repeated on numerous occasions. In 93 per cent of cases, the nests and offspring were tended by both couples. The female retains a stubborn sense of her proper functions, without having any idea of the individuals toward which she performs this duty. Whether the children are hers or not, she toils with equal fervor. It might be thought that this confusion is caused by a close resemblance between the two nests; but at different stages we chose nests of quite different appearances, joining up, for instance, the half of a shabby nest with the half of a rich nest of a different species. The results were more or less the same; Man does not distinguish between his own cell and another.
Having thus shown that in the matter of sentiment the Earth Dweller is an animal occupying a very low place in the scale of creation, we sought an appropriate means of gauging his intellectual faculties. The simplest way, it seemed to us, was to isolate a few individuals in a ray cage, and to put at their disposal food which could only be reached by means of more and more complex actions. I took particular pains to choose for this experiment certain Earth Dwellers for whom my colleague X. 38 claimed signs of scientific intelligence. In Appendix A will be found the details of this experiment. It showed beyond any possible doubt that the space of time within which Man lives is extremely limited in the past and future, that he immediately forgets, and that he is incapable of imagining the simplest method of self-preservation as soon as he is confronted by problems slightly different from those which he has, by heredity, become used to solving.
After a long period of experimenting on individual Earth Dwellers, my pupils and I became familiar enough with the movements of these animals to be able to observe them in their ordinary life without intervention on our part. It is of the utmost interest to follow, as I have done, the history of a manheap through several terrestrial years.
The origin of these human societies is unknown. Why and how did these animals abandon their freedom to become slaves of the manheap? We cannot tell. It may be that in this grouping process they found a support in warfare against other creatures and against natural forces; but it is a support for which they pay highly. No animal species is so ignorant as this one of leisure and the joy of living. In the great manheaps, and particularly the “Geometrical Manheap,” activity begins at dawn and is prolonged through part of the night. Were this activity necessary, it would be comprehensible; but Man is a creature of such limited nature, so much dominated by his instincts, that he produces hardly anything beyond his requirements. Over and over again have I seen objects accumulating in the reserve stores of a manheap in such numbers that they seemed to be a source of embarrassment; and yet, only a short distance away, another group would continue to manufacture the very same objects.
Little is also known of the division of Mankind into castes. It is established that certain of these animals till the soil and produce nearly all the foodstuffs, while others make the supplementary skins or build nests, and others seem to do nothing but move swiftly to and fro over the planet’s surface, eating and coupling. Why do the first two classes consent to clothe and feed the third? That remains obscure to me. E.X. 33 has written a notable thesis seeking to prove that this tolerance has a sexual origin. He has shown that at night, when the individuals of the superior caste foregather, the workers collect around the entrances to these festivities in order to see the half-nude females. According to him, the compensation of the sacrificed classes consists of the aesthetic pleasure provided by the spectacle of these easy existences. The theory strikes me as ingenious, but not so firmly based as to convince me of its truth.
For my own part, I would rather seek an explanation in Man’s amazing stupidity. It is a supreme folly to be forever seeking to explain the actions of Men by Uranian reasonings. That is wrong, profoundly wrong. Man is not guided by a free intelligence. Man obeys a fatal and unconscious incitement; he cannot choose what he shall do; he slides along haphazard, following an irresistible predetermined slope which will bring him to his goal. I amused myself by following the individual existences of certain Men in whom the functions of love seemed to be the essentials of their existence. I saw how the conquest of one female to start with brought upon his shoulders all the burdens of nests and young; but, not content with that first load, my male would go off in search of a second mate, for whom he set up a new nest. These simultaneous love affairs led the wretched animal into endless battles of which I was the spectator. It mattered nothing to him; his successive woes seemed to hold no lessons for him, and he went on putting his head into his wretched adventures without seeming to be one whit the wiser after the third than after the first
One of the strangest proofs of this inability to keep contact with the past and imagine the future was afforded me by the frightful struggles which I witnessed between individuals of one and the same species. On Uranus it would seem a grotesque idea that one group of Uranians could attack another group, hurling on it projectiles meant to injure it, and trying to asphyxiate it with poisonous gases.
That is what happened on the Earth. Within a few terrestrial years my observation showed me compact masses of men thus confronting each other, now in one corner of that planet, now in another. Sometimes they fought in the open; sometimes they crouched in earthworks and strove to demolish the adjoining earthworks by showering heavy lumps of metal on them. Note that they themselves were at the same time peppered in the same way. It is a hideous and ridiculous sight. The scenes of horror which one witnesses at these times are such that if these creatures had the slightest faculty for remembering, they would avoid their recurrence for at least several generations. But in the course of even their brief lifetimes, the same men will be seen plunging madly into the same murderous escapades.