^T^8 BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



Uial life ; not, hotvever, because he has no instincts — rather 

 because he has so many that they block each other s path!' 



Looking only to the more salient points of direction and 

 method in nature's advance towards intelligence, the general 

 course of events may be briefly adumbrated. Organic mechan- 

 isms capable of doing teleological work through blindly deter- 

 mined adjustments, reproduced congenitally, and carried to 

 various degrees of complexity and inflexibility of action, were 

 first evolved. With the organization of instinctive propensi- 

 ties, liable to antagonistic stimulation, came both the possibil- 

 ity and the provocation to choice. In the absence of intelligent 

 motive, choice would stand for the outcome of conflicting 

 impulses. The power of blind choice could be transmitted, 

 and that is what man himself begins with. 



Superiority in instinct endowments and concurring advan- 

 tages of environment would tend to liberate the possessors from 

 the severities of natural selection ; and thus nature, like domes- 

 tication, would furnish conditions inviting to greater freedom 

 of action, and with the same result, namely, that the instincts 

 would become more plastic and tractable. Plasticity of instinct 

 is not intelligence, but it is the open door through which the 

 great educator, experience, comes in and works every wonder 

 of intelligence. 



Spencer 1 has shown clearly that this plasticity must inevi- 

 tably result from the progressive complication of the instincts. 



" Tliat progressive complication of the instincts,'' he says, 

 " ivhicJi, as we have found, involves a progressive diminiition 

 of their purely automatic character, likewise involves a simulta- 

 neous commencement of memory and reason." 



1 Psychology, I, pp. 443 and 454, 455. 



