INSTINCT. 6 1 



follow, for the act has become habitual and will remain in the 

 absence of any such impulse. Again vague responses may be 

 hardened into more definite and more successful forms. A cat 

 with a general instinct to jump at small birds might with 

 practice jump straighter and more quickly because the quick, 

 straight jumps would result in the pleasure of capture. One 

 is likely, however, to be misled if he argues from the presup- 

 position that acts always tend to assume a "perfect" form. 

 If the animal gets along very well with its instinct still "im- 

 perfect," there may be no change. Lloyd Morgan, for instance, 

 has chosen a dubious example of perfecting through habit in the 

 seizing of bits of food by chicks. They often do fail to seize 

 in their first experiences, as he observed, but they often, per- 

 haps just as often, fail even after long experience. I took nine 

 chickens from \o to 14 days old and placed them one at a time 

 on a level surface over which were scattered bits of cracked 

 wheat (the food they had been eating in this same way for a 

 week) and watched their pecking. Out of 214 objects pecked 

 at, 159 were seized, 55 zvcre not. Out of the 159, only 116 

 were seized on the first peck, 25 on the second, 16 on the third, 

 and 2 on the fourth. This is far from a perfect record. 



In the growth of the chick's discrimination between objects 

 as food we find a sure manifestation of our law. The chick 

 instinctively pecks at all sorts of objects of suitable size, e.g., 

 tacks, match ends, printed letters, the eyes and toes of 

 his mates, his own excrement, etc. The pecks at bits of 

 food and small stones bring satisfaction, and the chick that 

 when first confronted by the situation, " grain of wheat, match 

 end, and excrement," was as likely to peck at one as another, 

 becomes a chick who almost inevitably pecks at the wheat. 

 Thus the vague instinctive response may be educated into a 

 lot of definite food preferences and avoidances. Not only thus 

 directly, but also in indirect and complex ways, instincts may 

 furnish the foundation of habits or, as we may better call them, 

 associations ; associations, that is, between certain situations or 

 circumstances and certain acts. A young animal instinctively 

 follows or keeps near its parent and thereby forms associations 

 which later will lead him to go independently to certain feed- 



