ANIMALS NOT AUTOMATA. 409 



innate; the plan is ready formed in the mind, requiring no premedita- 

 tion, no deliberation to determine the mode of action. In the rational 

 actions we acquire the knowledge of these plans for ourselves, and it 

 is the preliminary effort to determine what to do, and how to do it 

 to find the mode of action that tasks our intellectual abilities. But, 

 when we have once formed the plan, and acted upon it often enough 

 to remember its successive steps, so that we can repeat them in action 

 by rote without any reference to the rationale, it becomes a plan ready 

 formed in the mind, and the acting upon it becomes habitual. The 

 instinctive and habitual actions, then, are precisely alike in this, that 

 both are in conformity to a plan ready formed in the mind, requiring 

 no effort to form them for the occasion, and differ only in this, that in 

 the instinctive we found the plan ready formed, while in the habitual 

 we originally formed it by our own effort. If, after the latter plans 

 had become fixed in our memory, we should forget that we had ori- 

 ginally acquired them by our own effort, we would know no difference 

 between the instinctive and habitual action. 



The popular consciousness of this similarity is expressed in the 

 common adage that habit is second nature. If this view, which seems 

 to me to account for all the peculiarities of instinctive action, is cor- 

 rect, instinct is not a distinct faculty, capacity, property, or quality, 

 of being, which may be compared with or substituted for reason, but 

 has relation only to the mode in which the knowledge by which we 

 determine some of our actions was originally obtained. Whether the 

 innate knowledge of modes and plans is by transmission, or otherwise, 

 does not affect the theory. It is sufficient that they are thus ready 

 formed in the being without effort of its own. 



All intelligent actions, except perhaps those which are merely imi- 

 tative, must in the first instance be either instinctive or rational, the 

 habitual coming later through the transformation of the others by 

 repetition and memor)' ; the instinctive, however, not being materially 

 changed thereby. 



But the foundation of all our actions must be instinctive, there be- 

 ing no possible way in which we could ever learn that effort is the 

 means of using either our muscular or mental powers. 



In regard to the rational actions, I see no distinction in kind, but 

 only in degree, between those of man and the lower animals. Descend- 

 ing in the scale of intelligence, we may, and probably will, reach a 

 grade of beings which do not invent or form plans to meet new occa- 

 sions for action, and the efforts of such must be wholly instinctive; 

 but I have seen both dogs and horses draw inferences, and work out 

 ingenious plans of action, adapted to conditions so unusual and so im- 

 probable to them, as to preclude the assumption that they had been 

 specially provided by Nature, through hereditary transmission, or 

 otherwise, with the knowledge of the plan suited to the occasion. 



Prof. Huxley asserts that matter is a cause, a power not only in 



