LAWS OF SUBCONSCIOUS HUMAN NATURE 337
this control had to be shared, it was only natural that Caliban should
celebrate his release from an irksome servitude by moving at a slower
and more regular gait than ever.

On this showing, a process of social disintegration running through a
regular series of phases in an unvarying order, and moving at a set pace
over periods of approximately identical length in all cases, can be seen to
reflect the ethos of a Subconscious Human Nature so faithfully that the
detection and recognition of this process can hardly be dismissed as the
baseless conceit of a phantasy arbitrarily imposing a subjective standard
pattern of its own on the histories of broken-down civilizations in their
disintegration-phase. A student of the d-devant intelligence that had
been petrified into instinct in the psychic life of the bees had ascertained
that, in this apian psychic universe, instinctive acts that fall into se-
quences of chapters have to be performed integrally if they are to be
performed at all. No chapter can be omitted because it has become
superfluous, or be repeated because it has not been performed effectively
at the first essay, or be transposed from its established place in the
series because a transposition would make for increased efficiency ;x for the
law that rules over the instinctive life of the bees is not the flexible law of
rational experiment and reflection; it is the adamantine law of the Medes
and Persians which altereth not',3 however convincingly and insistently
a change may be demanded by an empirical common sense.

These findings of an apian social science can be translated into the
human language of Plato's simile of the charioteer and our own simile of
the cart and the wheel. So long as the driver of a vehicle is seated on the
box with the reins in his hands, no spectator who does not happen to be
in the driver's confidence can foretell the equipage's destination, route,
or speed; but, if a brawl between two rival coachmen scrambling for pos-
session of the reins unintendedly gives the horses their head, an observer
has only to acquaint himself with the horse-power of the draft animals
and the relief of the terrain in order to be able to calculate exactly how
many seconds will elapse and how many revolutions of the wheels will
occur before the runaway horses land themselves and the carriage and its
quarrelling occupants in the ditch. Tertur equis auriganeque audit currus
habenas.'3 For the purposes of this calculation it makes no difference
whether the accident has overtaken the party at the outset of the journey
or within sight of their destination, nor what route the map records nor
what mileage the taximeter registers nor what passage of time the stop-
watch reads down to the moment when the driver lost control and tie
catastrophe happened. All these antecedent data are irrelevant because,
whatever they may be—and they may, of course, be widely diverse in
different cases—the carriage and pair, when once left to their own de-
vices, will take, in every case, an identical course and an identical time
to go to perdition.

See Kingston, R. W. G.: Problems of Instinct and Intelligence (London 1928, Aroold),

. iv, pp. 38—53.

Dan. vi. 8. 3 Virgil: Georgia, Book 1,1. 514-