INSTINCT AND INTELLIGENCE. 663 



rience. Evidently, therefore, great wisdom may be attained even with 

 small intelligence, if only the experience be proportionally great. Wis- 

 dom increases with experience without limit, if only the plasticity of 

 the brain, or its capacity to receive and retain impressions, remain un- 

 impaired. Now, suppose a number of the ancestors of the bees many 

 hundred thousand years ago, before these specific instincts were devel- 

 oped ; suppose, further, that these mdividual insects had covitinued 

 to live from that time to this, and retained their brain-plasticity unim- 

 paired. Even with the smallest modicum of intelligence, such instincts 

 would, by experience, slowly improve their habits from year to year, 

 from century to century, from millennium to millennium, until they 

 would reach a surprising skill in accomplishing the most complex re- 

 sults. This would be habit, not instinct. The habit so long forming, 

 so useful, and therefore so invariable, would of course be embodied in 

 a very decided brain-structure. Now, precisely the same result is far 

 more perfectly reached by the experience of many generations transmit- 

 ted and accumulated by the law of inlieritance. I ssij more perfectli/, 

 because of the natural selection of only the fittest in each generation. 



Thus we see that instinctive wisdom is also the result of exjierience, 

 but it is ancestral, and not individual experience. Individual experi- 

 ence is first fixed in habit, and then habit is transmitted and petrified 

 in instinct. In a note published in the Philosophical Magazine, April, 

 1871, 1 speak of instinct as " inherited experience.'''' I did not then know 

 that I had been anticipated by a few months by Hering ("Archives des 

 Science," February, 1871), who calls instinct ''inherited meinory.'''' 

 These are but different modes of expressing the same idea. Intelli- 

 gence works by individual experience treasured in memory ; instinct 

 by racial or communal experience treasured in inherited structure. 

 But memory is evidently the result of brain-structure formed by ex- 

 perience ; therefore also is instinct inherited memory. Again, knowl- 

 edge is remembered experience ; therefore is instinct also inherited 

 Jcnowledge. Thus experience, memory, knowledge, things which seem 

 to us so indissolubly connected with individual identity, are also 

 sometimes inherited. 



Thus, then, the sum of experience and the mental wealth which is 

 accumulated by experience consists of two parts, individual and in- 

 herited. In man the individual acquisition is large, and the inherit- 

 ance is comparatively small. In the lower animals the individual ac- 

 quisition is small, while the inheritance is large. In bees the wealth 

 is almost wholly inheritance. 



We now easily see why intelligence varies inversely as instinct 

 why high intelligence seems incompatible with remarkable and invaria- 

 ble instinct. It is because, with high intelligence, actions are so varied, 

 in difierent individuals and in different generations, that it is impos- 

 sible that their results should accumulate and become petrified in 

 structure. But, in the lower animals, the conditions of life are nar- 



