Part 4

M. Albert Lemoine, who has written the best treatise[3] known to us on instinct and habit, distinguishes instinctive actions as those which are neither due to mechanical or chemical causes, nor to intelligence, experience, or will. They are actions which take place with a general fixity and precision, are generally present in all the individuals of each species, and can be perfectly performed the very first time their action is called for, so that they cannot be due to habit. Instinct, he very truly says, is more than a want and less than a desire. Instinct is a certain felt internal stimulus to definite actions which has its foundation in a certain sense of want, but is not definite feeling of want of the particular end to be attained. Were that recognised, it would not be _instinct_, but _desire_. It is but a vague craving to exercise certain activities the exercise of which conduces to useful or needful, but unforeseen, end. Instinct often sets in motion organs quite different from those which feel the prick of want, and which do not (experience apart) seem to have relation with it. Hunger does not stimulate to action the organs of digestion which suffer from it, but excites the limbs and jaws to perform acts by which food may be obtained and eaten. In examining into instinct, we must be careful not to omit the consideration of it as it exists in man, since we can know no creature so well as we can, by the help of language and reflection, know ourselves and our own species. Nevertheless, it may be well to begin by calling attention to certain apparently undeniable cases of instinct in other animals, since in them instinct is much more apparent and complex than in man, in whom it is indeed reduced to a minimum. It might naturally be expected to be so reduced in him—if it is a power serving to bridge over the gulf which exists between such almost mechanical action as reflex action, and true intelligence—since in man acts of intelligence, or habits originated through intelligence, come so constantly into play. But before enumerating cases of animal instinct, a word should be said as to one character which M. Lemoine attributes to instinctive action, namely, “consciousness,” This term is an exceedingly ambiguous one, as it is often referred, not only to our distinct intellectual perception of our own being and acts, but also to every state of feeling however rudimentary it may be. I would therefore avoid the use of so equivocal a term, while fully admitting that no sensation in any animal is possible without some subjective psychical state analogous to what I have before denominated “consentience.” Now, as to the lower animals: birds unquestionably possess instinctive powers. Chickens, two minutes after they have left the egg,[4] will follow with their eyes the movements of crawling insects, and peck at them, judging distance and direction with almost infallible accuracy. They will instinctively appreciate sounds, readily running towards an invisible hen hidden in a box, when they hear her “call.” Some young birds, also, have an innate, instinctive horror of the sight of a hawk and of the sound of its voice. Swallows, titmice, tomtits, and wrens, after having been confined from birth, are capable of flying successfully at once, when liberated, on their wings having attained the necessary growth to render flight possible. The Duke of Argyll[5] relates some very interesting particulars about the instincts of birds, especially of the water ousel, the merganser, and the wild duck. Even as to the class of beasts I find recorded:[6] “Five young polecats were found comfortably embedded in dry withered grass; and in a side hole, of proper dimensions for such a larder, were forty frogs and two toads, all alive, but merely capable of sprawling a little. On examination the whole number, toads and all, proved to have been purposely and dexterously bitten through the brain.” Evidently the parent polecat had thus provided the young with food which could be kept perfectly fresh, because alive, and yet was rendered quite unable to escape. This singular instinct is like others which are yet more fully developed amongst insects—a class of animals the instincts of which are so numerous, wonderful, and notorious that it will be, probably, enough to refer to one or two examples. The female carpenter bee, in order to protect her eggs, excavates, in some piece of wood, a series of chambers, in special order with a view to a peculiar mode of exit for her young: but the young mother can have no conscious knowledge of the series of actions subsequently to ensue. The female of the wasp, _sphex_, affords another well-known but very remarkable example of a complex instinct closely related to that already mentioned in the case of the polecat. The female wasp has to provide fresh, living animal food for her progeny, which, when it quits its egg, quits it in the form of an almost helpless grub, utterly unable to catch, retain, or kill an active, struggling prey. Accordingly the mother insect has only to provide and place beside her eggs suitable living prey, but so to treat it that it may be a helpless, unresisting victim. That victim may be a mere caterpillar, or it may be a great, powerful grasshopper, or even that most fierce, active, and rapacious of insect tyrants, a fell and venomous spider. Whichever it may be, the wasp adroitly stings it at the spot which induces, or in the several spots which induce, complete paralysis as to motion, let us hope as to sensation also. This done, the wasp entombs the helpless being with its own egg, and leaves it for the support of the future grub. Another species feeds her young one from time to time with fresh food, visiting at suitable intervals the nest she has made and carefully covered and concealed with earth, which she removes and replaces, as far as necessary, at each visit. If the opening be made ready for her, this, instead of helping her to get at her young, altogether puzzles her, and she no longer seems to recognise her young, thus showing how thoroughly “instinctive” her proceedings are. Other instances of instinct, such as those of the stag-beetle and emperor moth, I will refer to presently. But most wonderful, perhaps, of all are the instincts of social insects, such as bees, where there are not only males and females, but a large population of practically neuter insects, the special instincts and peculiarities of which have of course to be transmitted, not directly by an antecedent set of neuter animals, but by females, the instincts and peculiarities of which are very different from those of the neutral portion of their progeny.

[3] _L’Habitude et l’Instinct._ Baillière. Paris. 1875.

[4] As Mr. Spalding has shown. To him I am indebted for the other facts about young birds given in the text.

[5] _The Unity of Nature_, chap. iii.

[6] See _Magazine of Natural History_, vol. iv. p. 206.

The instincts we have hitherto noticed, and, I may say briefly, the instincts of animals generally, are destined to subserve two functions, (1) the preservation and, mainly, the nutrition, of the individual, and (2) the reproduction of the species. Armed with the facts we have now noticed, let us turn to consider instinct as it displays itself in ourselves. As one example, there is the instinct action by which an infant first sucks the nipple, and then swallows the thence-extracted nourishment with which its mouth is filled. This action must be reckoned as instinctive, because it is done directly after birth, when there has been no time for learning to perform the action; it is one absolutely necessary for the life of the infant; it is an action which is definite and precise, similarly performed by all the individuals of the species, though effected by a very complex mechanism, and is effected prior to experience. Yet it is not as mechanical as reflex action, for not only sensation, but consentience, accompanies the act. Thus sucking in man is an instinctive action, while spitting, on the other hand, is an art. The latter is not necessary to life, and the power of performing it is slowly acquired by experience, as are also our powers of walking and feeding ourselves. But the action of sucking in an adult human being is of course not instinctive; and because the child learns to walk, it by no means follows that the insect learns to fly. It is thus plain that actions may be instinctive in one animal and not in another; or at one period of life in the same animal and not at another. In a child, however, sucking, deglutition, inspiration, and expiration are instinctive actions, as are also those by which the products of excretion are removed from the body. The second class of instincts, those which ensure the continuance of the race, show themselves of course, only much later. Yet, long before the little girl can represent to herself future tributes to her charms, she seeks to decorate her tiny body with the arts of infant coquetry. Still less does she look forward to the pains and pleasures of maternity when she begins to caress and chastise, to soothe and cherish, her first doll, and fondly presses it to that region whence her future offspring will draw its nourishment. Again, when the lapse of a few years having made her a young woman and the boy a youth, they first feel the influence of love, however ignorant they may be of the physiology of their race, they will none the less, circumstances permitting, be surely impelled towards the performance of very definite actions. In the more refined individuals of the highest races of mankind, the material, merely animal, consummation of sexual love is most certainly far from being the one great end distinctly looked forward to by each pair of lovers. Yet every incident of affectionate intercourse, every tender glance, every contact of hand or lip, infallibly leads on towards the one useful end, indispensable to the race, which nature has in view. Such actions fully merit to be called “instinctive.” Indeed the act of generation is ministered to in nature by the most manifold, imperious, general, and inexplicable of all the instincts, and its instinctive character is the most strongly marked of all. It has emphatically for its origin a rigorously determined and precise want, partly painful, partly pleasurable—a mixture of a feeling of privation with a sense of power. Its end is unknown to the agent, or if known is disregarded, and in almost all animals it demands the concurrent and reciprocal action of two diverse organisms. If anyone would deny that it is instinctive in man, I would advise him to study the sad phenomena connected therewith which may be observed in our asylums for the insane.

There are other human actions which are sometimes reckoned as instinctive, such as guarding the eye against injury by suddenly closing the eyelids. This action, however, appears to be an acquired art, though the habitual act of winking to keep clean the surface of the eye may be instinctive. Some other actions, however, not generally regarded as instinctive, I should be disposed so to regard. Such are the first _active_ exercises of the senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling (the first “looking,” the first “listening,” etc.) which the child performs at the very beginning of its learning to perform them. It would seem, then, as if no one could deny the existence of such a thing as instinct, and yet it has been denied, not only in recent times, but centuries ago. Thus Montaigne sought to explain instinct as but a form of intelligence, while Descartes taught that it was but mechanism. Condillac regarded it as the result of individual experience, and Lemarck considered it to be merely “habit” which had become hereditary. In our own day Darwin has sought to explain it as partly the result of accidental variations of activity, which variations have become naturally selected, and partly the result of intelligent, purposive action which has become habitual and inherited. Let us consider these attempts at explanation seriatim. First as to mechanism: This is an hypothesis no one at present entertains, as everyone now credits animals with sensitivity. Moreover, instincts are not absolutely invariable, but are modifiable according to the degree of “intelligence” which animals possess. They cannot, therefore, be due merely to a mechanism. The attempt to explain “Instinct” by mere “reflex action” is equivalent to an attempt to explain a phenomenon by omitting its most striking characteristic. In “reflex action” we have a sudden response to a stimulus, which response is more or less purposive as regards the time of its occurrence, but has no reference to future events to occur long after the faintest waves of the stimulating action have died out. The very essence of “instinct,” however, _is_ to provide for a more or less distant future, often, as we have seen, the future of another generation. It is essentially _telic_, and directed to a future unforeseen, but generally useful, end. This explanation, then, is fundamentally and necessarily inadequate. It is like an explanation of the building of a house, by “bricks, mortar, bricklayers, and hodmen,” with the omission of all reference to any influence governing their motions and directing them towards a common and predetermined end which is not theirs. But though we cannot _explain_ “instinct” by “reflex action,” there is none the less a certain obvious affinity between these two forms of animal activity, and it is in part my object to point out the nature of this very affinity.

Next we may pass in review the two hypotheses that instinct is but (1) a form of intelligence, or (2) individual experience. As to the first, I have already given instances of unquestionably instinctive actions performed by birds as soon as they quit the eggshell, and it would be but waste of time to argue against the view that the human infant is guided by intelligent purpose and conscious foresight in his very first acts of sucking, swallowing, and defecation. Actual intelligence, therefore, is a radically insufficient explanation, as also, for the very same reasons, is Condillac’s hypothesis as to individual experience. About “lapsed intelligence” I will speak later on. Lemarck’s hypothesis, that instinct is but inherited habit, is one which is much more worthy of careful consideration than any we have yet considered. For it may be admitted at once that habits may be inherited. There are many instances of such inheritance in human beings, and as regards the lower animals, the barking of dogs may be taken as an instance of a habit thus perpetuated. In fact “habit,” when inherited, so simulates instinct, that their confusion is far from surprising. There is, however, this radical difference between them: “habit” enables an agent to repeat with facility and precision an act which has been done before, but “instinct” determines with precision the first performance of such act. Referring instinct to habit, but temporarily relieves the difficulty of those who object to instinct, by putting it a step back. It is impossible to believe that any of the progenitors of an infant of to-day first acquired, during his or her lifetime, the habit of sucking, or that the habits of neuter insects thus arose. But after all, if we _could_ explain “instinct” by “habit,” should we thereby make the phenomena less mysterious? “Habit” is due to an internal spontaneity of living things. A living thing no doubt requires some internal solicitation, in order that it should move, but when it does move that movement is _its own_. All living organisms tend to act. With them action is not only their nature, ’tis a want; and, within limits, their powers and energies increase with action, and diminish and finally perish through repose. The power of generating any “habits,” lies in the very first act of the kind an organism performs, and it is only the first act which owes nothing to habit. If such were not the case, an act might be performed a thousand times and yet not generate habit. It is this mysterious internal active tendency which distinguishes all living organisms from inorganic bodies. The latter tend simply to persist as they are, and have no relations with the past or the future. They have, therefore, no relations with time at all—for the actual present ever evades us. Organisms, on the other hand, which are permanently more or less changed, through habit, by every new motion and sensation, have their future prepared by their past, and thus, as it were, at every present moment they live both in the past and in the future, a mode of existence which attains its fullest development in the highest living organism—man, the creature looking before and after! Thus those who would do away with mystery in nature would gain little by explaining instinct through habit, though, as we have seen, the phenomena presented to us by the human infant and by neuter insects absolutely bar any such explanation. Moreover, the attempt to explain “instinct” through “inheritance” is a contradiction, since “inheritance” supposes something already obtained, otherwise it could not be transmitted. So far, then, from “hereditary transmission” explaining “instinct,” instinct, in whatever remote ancestor it first arose, must have been a violation of the law of hereditary transmission.

Now as to “lapsed intelligence:” This hypothesis assumes that a conscious deliberate, discriminating faculty must have once been exercised by wasps, bees, ants, and other much more lowly animals, in the performance of all those actions which are now instinctive. But could the adult female insect be supposed to foresee the future needs of her progeny, often so totally different from her own wants? It would surely be too much to ask us to believe that she could distinctly recollect all her past experience as a chrysalis and as a grub from the moment she first quitted the egg. Can we suppose that the generative acts of male insects, such as bees, could have been due to deliberate and rational choice, when every such act is necessarily fatal to him who performs it?

Nevertheless, persuaded as I am that “lapsed intelligence” will not explain “instinct” generally, I should be the last to deny that certain apparently instinctive actions may be so explained, and I fully admit that intelligent action in ourselves does tend to become practically though not really instinctive. It is, moreover, very fortunate for us that such is the case, as thereby we are saved great mental friction. Our intellect has first to be laboriously applied to learn what afterwards becomes almost automatic, as the actions of reading, writing, etc. Sensations and bodily actions having been duly kneaded together, the intellect becomes free to withdraw and apply itself to other work—fresh conquests of mere animality—leaving the organism to carry on automatically the new faculties thus acquired. Were it not for this power which we have of withdrawing our attention, our intellect would be absorbed and wasted in the merest routine work, instead of being set free to appropriate and render practically instinctive, a continually wider and more important range of deliberate purposive actions. We come now to the sixth and last attempt to explain instinct, namely, Mr. Darwin’s attempt. He has recognised the futility of seeking to explain many instinctive actions in any of the modes we have yet considered, and he has proposed, as before said, to explain such residual instinctive phenomena by the play of natural selection, _i.e._ of the destructive forces of nature upon small, accidental abnormalities of action on the part of individuals of a species; such abnormalities, when favorable to the existence of the individual, being preserved and perpetuated by the destruction of the other individuals of the same species who adhered to their ancestral tendencies. But this proposed explanation is not an explanation of the _origin_ of instincts, but only of the changes and transformations of instincts already acquired. But putting back the date or modifying the form of the original instinct, in no way alters the essential nature of instincts or diminishes its mystery. Let us look at one or two strong cases of instinct, and see if it is credible that they should be due to mere accidental, haphazard, minute changes in habits already acquired. In the first place, there is the wonderful instinct of the duck, which feigns to have an injured wing, in order to entice a dog away from the pursuit of her ducklings. Is it conceivable that such an act was first done by pure accident, and that the descendants of her who so acted, having inherited the tendency, have been alone selected and preserved? Again, there is the case of the wasp, sphex, which stings spiders, caterpillars, and grasshoppers exactly in the spot, or spots, where their nervous ganglia lie, and so paralyses them. Even the strongest advocate of the intelligence of insects would not affirm that the mother sphex has a knowledge of the comparative anatomy of the nervous system of these very diversely formed insects. According to the doctrine of natural selection, either an ancestral wasp must have accidentally stung them each in the right places, and so our sphex of to-day is the naturally selected descendant of a line of insects which inherited this lucky tendency to sting different insects differently, but always in the exact situation of their nervous ganglia; or else the young of the ancestral sphex originally fed on dead food, but the offspring of some individuals who happened to sting their prey so as to paralyse but not kill them, were better nourished and so the habit grew. But the incredible supposition that the ancestor should accidentally have acquired the habit of stinging different insects differently, but always in the right spot, is not eliminated by the latter hypothesis.