NATURE OF INSTINCT. 337 



has been said, nearly to the same effect, that Instinct works 

 by the love of self an axiom of which, however, the hen gives 

 a strange illustration when (as has been known) she sits her- 

 self into an atrophy over her eggs, or when she points out, 

 and leaves for her brood, the grain which appetite bids her 

 swallow. Scarcely even can the garden white butterfly be 

 supposed to gratify her senses when she forsakes the sweets of 

 the flower-border to deposit her eggs upon a cabbage. And 

 if these, with a hundred other acts of instinctive performance, 

 can hardly be assignable to mere corporeal pleasure, still less, 

 happily, is there ground for adopting the most absurd and 

 most abhorrent theory of Mylius, who would make sensation, 

 not pleasurable but painful, the mainspring of all instinctive 

 actions, who would persuade us that the weaving caterpillar 

 exudes and twists her silk cocoon, not in a fit of industry, but 

 in " a fit of the colic." 



Instinct is supposed by Addison to be an immediate and 

 constant impulse of the Deity, but the mistakes into which it 

 sometimes falls have been urged against the correctness of 

 such a notion. Err, however, as it occasionally does, this 

 guiding power is usually so regular in its operations, and 

 would seem, moreover, to exercise such strict control, that did 

 we allow to animals no other mental principle, we should be 

 forced to consider them, with Descartes and others, as ma- 

 chines and nothing more. That they all deserve to be regarded 

 in a higher light, there are certain of their actions which go 



III. X 



