INSTINCT 187 



purpose it is performed, is usually said to be instinctive. 

 But I could show that none of these characters of 

 instinct are universal. A little dose, as Pierre Huber 

 expresses it, of judgment or reason, often comes into 

 play, even in animals very low in the scale of nature. 



Frederick Cuvier and several of the older metaphy- 

 sicians have compared instinct with habit. This com- 

 parison gives, I think, a remarkably accurate notion of 

 the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is 

 performed, but not of its origin. How unconsciously 

 many habitual actions are performed, indeed not rarely 

 in direct opposition to our conscious will ! yet they may 

 be modified by the will or reason. Habits easily become 

 associated with other habits, and with certain periods of 

 time and states of the body. When once acquired, they 

 often remain constant throughout life. Several other 

 points of resemblance between instincts and habits could 

 be pointed out. As in repeating a well-known song, so 

 in instincts, one action follows another by a sort of 

 rhythm ; if a person be interrupted in a song, or in 

 repeating anything by rote, he is generally forced to 

 go back to recover the habitual train of thought : so 

 P. Huber found it was with a caterpillar, which makes a 

 very complicated hammock ; for if he took a caterpillar 

 which had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth 

 stage of construction, and put it into a hammock com- 

 pleted up only to the third stage, the caterpillar simply 

 re-performed the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of con- 

 struction. If, however, a caterpillar were taken out of 

 a hammock made up, for instance, to the third stage, 

 and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so 

 that much of its work was already done for it, far from 

 feeling the benefit of this, it was much embarrassed, and, 

 in order to complete its hammock, seemed forced to 

 start from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus 

 tried to complete the already finished work. 



If we suppose any habitual action to become in- 

 herited — and I think it can be shown that this does 

 sometimes happen — then the resemblance between what 

 originally was a habit and an instinct becomes so close 



