First of all, I found myself thinking about a delightful revery
by M. Anatole France, in which he says that if he had been the
Demiurge, he would have put youth at the end of life instead of
at the beginning, and would have otherwise so ordered matters
that every human being should have three stages of development,
somewhat corresponding to those of the lepidoptera. Then it
occurred to me that this fantasy was in substance scarcely more
than the delicate modification of a most ancient doctrine, common
to nearly all the higher forms of religion.

Western faiths especially teach that our life on earth is a
larval state of greedy helplessness, and that death is a pupa-
sleep out of which we should soar into everlasting light. They
tell us that during its sentient existence, the outer body should
be thought of only as a kind of caterpillar, and thereafter as a
chrysalis;--and they aver that we lose or gain, according to our
behavior as larvae, the power to develop wings under the mortal
wrapping. Also they tell us not to trouble ourselves about the
fact that we see no Psyche-imago detach itself from the broken
cocoon: this lack of visual evidence signifies nothing, because
we have only the purblind vision of grubs. Our eyes are but half-
evolved. Do not whole scales of colors invisibly exist above and
below the limits of our retinal sensibility? Even so the
butterfly-man exists,--although, as a matter of course, we cannot
see him.

But what would become of this human imago in a state of perfect
bliss? From the evolutional point of view the question has
interest; and its obvious answer was suggested to me by the
history of those silkworms,--which have been domesticated for