AE 1194 [2]
Man was created to perform uses, and this is to love the neighbor, so all who come into heaven, however many there are, must do uses. All the delight and blessedness of these is according to uses and the love of uses. Heavenly joy is from no other source. He who believe that such joy is possible in idleness is much deceived.
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AE [4] Still more striking evidences are seen with bees, which have a government after the form of human governments. They build for themselves little houses of wax according to the rules of art in a series, with commodious passages for transit; they fill the cells with honey collected from flowers; they appoint over themselves a queen to be the common parent of a future race; she dwells above her people in the midst of her guards; and when she is about to bring forth they follow her, with a mixed multitude after them; thus she goes from cell to cell, and lays a little egg in each, and so continually until her matrix is emptied, when she returns to her home; this she does repeatedly. Her guards, which are called drones because they perform no other use than as so many servants to one mistress, and perhaps inspire her with something of amatory desire, and because they do no work, are judged useless; and for this reason, and lest they should seize and consume the gains and work of others, they are brought out and deprived of their wings. Thus the community is purged of its idle members. Moreover, when the new progeny is grown up, they are commanded by a general voice, which is heard as a murmur, to depart and to seek a home and food for themselves. And they go out and collect into a swarm, and institute a like order in a new hive. These and many other things which investigators have discovered and published in books, are not unlike the governments that have been instituted and ordained in kingdoms and commonwealths by human intelligence and wisdom, according to the laws of justice and judgment. Moreover, like men, they know as it were the approach of winter, for which they gather food lest they should die of hunger. Who can deny that such things are from a spiritual origin, or can believe that they can possibly be from any other origin? To me all these things are evidences and proofs of a spiritual influx into natural things, and I have greatly wondered how they could be made evidences and proofs of the operation of nature alone, as they are by certain persons who are deluded by self-intelligence.
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