THE IXSTIXCTIl'E BEHAVIOR OF ANTS. 519 



dents to the study of instinct. At any rate, there is no end of the 

 literature on the subject. 1 Instinct could not, of course, be studied by 

 so many authors without much controversy, and the employment of 

 the word in many different senses. This is pardonable, at least to some 

 extent, since the subject itself presents no less than four aspects, 

 according as it is studied from the ethological, physiological, psycho- 

 logical or metaphysical points of view. From the first two of these 

 instinct is open to objective biological study in the form of the " instinct 

 actions." These may be studied by the physiologist merely as a regu- 

 larly coordinated series of movements depending on changes in the 

 tissues and organs, and by the ethologist to the extent that they tend to 

 bring the organism into effective relationship with its living and inor- 

 ganic environment. But that these movements have a deeper origin 

 in psychological changes may be inferred on the basis of analogy from 

 our own subjective experience which shows us our instincts arising as 

 impulses and cravings, the so-called " instinct- feelings "; and these in 

 turn yield abundant material for metaphysical and ethical speculation. 

 Modern biological writers naturally wish to restrict the term instinct 

 to the instinct-actions, whereas scholastic, psychological, metaphysical 

 and theological writers throw the emphasis on the instinct-feelings. 

 That this was the original meaning of the word is shown by its deri- 

 vation from the Latin instingucrc, to incite, and its probable relation 

 to the Greek ivari^stv. The contrast between the subjective and objec- 

 tive aspects of instinct is brought out sharply in Descartes' notion of 

 the animal as an automaton, a conception which has profoundly 

 affected biological and even theological thought. The following pas- 

 sage, quoted from the Seventh Bridgewater Treatise by the Rev. 

 William Kirby, will make this clear: "An eminent French zoologist 

 [Virey] has illustrated the change of instincts resulting from the modi- 



1 During the past ten years I have read a small library of books on instinct. 

 Among these the folio wing have been most suggestive from the physiological 

 point of view: Chapter XIII of Loeb's "Physiology of the Brain," Driesch's 

 "Die ' Seele ' als Elemental er Xaturfaktor," and the second volume of his 

 " Science and Philosophy of the Organism " ; from the psychological point of 

 view : G. H. Schneider's " Der Thierische Wille," Wundt's " Vorlesungen uber 

 die Menschen- und Thierseele," Chapter XXIV of the second volume of Wm. 

 James's "Principles of Psychology," and Groos's "Die Spiele der Thiere"; from 

 the metaphysical point of view : Chapter XXVII of the second volume of 

 Schopenhauer's "Welt als Wille and Vorstellung," Chapter III of von Hart- 

 mann's " Philosophic des Unbewussten " and Chapter II of Bergson's " L'fivolu- 

 tion Creatrice " ; from the scholastic and doctrinaire points of view : Reimarus's 

 " Allgemeirie Betrachtungen uber die Triebe der Thiere" (1798), Joly's " L'ln- 

 stinct, ses Rapports avec la Vie et avec 1'Intelligence," Wasmann's " Instinct und 

 Intelligenz im Thierreich," and Supplement A of Maher's " Psychology : Em- 

 pirical and Rational." 



