It is for this reason that such writers as Sir John Lubbock and Herbert Spencer have not hesitated to say that certain kinds of social insects have immensely surpassed men, both in social and in ethical progress.
But that is not all that it is necessary to say here.

You might think that I am only repeating a kind of parable.

The important thing is the opinion of scientific men that humanity will at last, in the course of millions of years, reach the ethical conditions of the ants.

It is only five or six years ago that some of these conditions were established by scientific evidence, and I want to speak of them.

They have a direct bearing upon important ethical questions; and they have startled the whole moral world, and set men thinking in entirely new directions.
In order to explain how the study of social insects has set moralists of recent years thinking in a new direction, it will be necessary to generalize a great deal in the course of so short a lecture.