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possession of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, devours them, and 
glorifies that God whose Fatherly bounty has prepared the festal 
board. He removes its milk from the cow, its honey from the bee, its 
wool from the sheep ; and because he uses these animals for his 
profit, he imagines they have been created for his use. He cannot 
imagine that the least blade of grass is not there for him.”—(Ecker- 
mann. Gespräche mit Goethe, t. ii., p. 282.) 
“Why,” says Montaigne, “ should not a gosling say thus : ‘All the 
parts of the universe regard me ; the earth serves me for walking, 
the sun to give me light, the stars to inspire me with their influences. 
I have this use of the winds, that of the waters ; there is nothing 
which this vault so favourably regards as me ; I am the darling 
of nature. Does not man look after, lodge, and serve me ? It is for 
me he sows and grinds. If he eat me, so does he his fellow-man as 
well ; and so do I the worms that kill and eat him. ... A crane 
could say as much, and still more magnificently, for the liberty of its 
flight, and for the possession of that high and beautiful region.”— 
(Essais, ii., xii. See P. Janet’s Final Causes, pp. 192-4.) 
Hence when Theodore Parker, on the 17th December, 
1 859, wrote his amusing satire, “A Bumble-bee’s Thoughts 
on the Plan and Purpose of the Universe,” which might 
have been, and possibly was, suggested by Mr. Darwin’s 
account of the correlation between the humble-bee and 
the red clover, it is quite clear that he did not promulgate 
a new philosophy which was the result of the publication 
of The Origin of Species. He merely took the newest 
and the most striking illustration. The assumption that 
the world and all that it contains was made for man alone 
is satirised with cutting irony in the speech of the philo 
sophical Bumble-bee, which he is represented as making on 
the 21 st of June, in the year One million six hundred and 
seventeen before our era, the burden of which is that the 
Bumble-bee is the purpose of the universe : “ Yes, gentle 
men, the plan of the universe intends the Bumble-bee as 
its End and Pinal Cause. Without him the world would 
have been as unmeaning as a flower with no honey in its 
breast.” * 
* The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, vol. xii., pp. 150-164.