From an introduction by Marguerite Yourcenar to The Writing of Stones, Roger Caillois

....In short, there had taken place in that great intellect the equivalent of the Copernican revolution: man was no longer the center of the universe, except in the sense that the center is everywhere; man, like all the rest, was a cog in the whole system of turning wheels. Quite early on, having entered "the forbidden laboratories," Caillois applied himself to the study of the diagonals which link the species, of the recurrent phenomena that act, so to speak, as a matrix of forms. His work on the octopus and the praying mantis showed him the relation between a creature belonging to the lowest reaches of the animal abyss and the fantasies and desires inhabiting the deeps of humanity. In Meduse et Cie (Medusa and Company) he meditated on the insect imagination with its extravagant and terrifying transformations, its masks for display or for battle, its nuptial ornaments or instruments of hypnotism, not all of them utilitarian but seemingly corresponding to an almost conscious need for change and elaboration. 

One of the working hypotheses of modern science - that nature always acts with the greatest possible economy of means and toward the most practical of ends - finally came to appear unacceptable to Caillois. "Nature is not a miser." He had become more aware of it as a mine of prodigality, a feast of superfluity; of the element of fantasy, the aesthetic factor whether unconscious or otherwise which is inherent in every scrap of matter and of which man's own aesthetic may be no more than one of many manifestations, and one often distorted by our exaggerated awareness of it ....