Here We Have A Contrary
Effect - It Is The Insects Which Have Been Transformed; The Millions Of
Wood-Ants, Let
Us say, inhabiting an old and exceedingly populous nest
have been transformed into men, but in form only; mentally they
Are
still ants, all silently, everlastingly hurrying by, absorbed in their
ant-business. You can almost smell the formic acid. Walking in the
street, one of the swarming multitude, you are in but not of it. You
are only one with the others in appearance; in mind you are as unlike
them as a man is unlike an ant, and the love and sympathy you feel
towards them is about equal to that which you experience when looking
down on the swarm in a wood-ants' nest.
Undoubtedly when I am in the crowd, poisoned by contact with the crowd-
mind - the formic acid of the spirits - I am not actually or keenly
conscious of the great gulf between me and the others, but, as in the
former case, the sense of relief is experienced here too in escaping
from it. The people of the small rustic community have not been de-
humanised. I am a stranger, and they do not meet me with blank faces
and pass on in ant-like silence. So great is the revulsion that I look
on them as of my kin, and am so delighted to be with them again after
an absence of centuries, that I want to embrace and kiss them all.
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