1 8 PSYCHE [February 



If we take, as one criterion of intelligence, the power to choose between alter- 

 natives, then insects are more intelligent than is generally admitted. The control 

 of locomotion, the selection of prey, and the avoidance of enemies, as results of 

 experience, indicate powers of discrimination. Honey bees sometimes utilize var- 

 nish, pitch, and other substances as cements, instead of laboriously manufacturing 

 their propolis from the exudations of plants. 



Again, an ant, having discovered food, returns and leads its companions to 

 the prize; or one ant may summon others to its assistance. Here the power of 

 intercommunication, conceded to exist among the social Hymenoptera, implies 

 some amount of intelligence. 



If instinct is blind, or mechanical, with no adjustment of means to ends, then 

 a pronounced individuality of action must signify something more than instinct, — 

 as in the case of the Ammophila. 



From the standpoint of pure instinct, indeed, much of the behavior of the 

 social Hymenoptera is inexplicable. The activities of the harvesting ants, the mili- 

 tary or the slave-holding species, are of such nature that the possibility of educa- 

 tion by experience and instruction is strong, to say the least. In fact, Forel and 

 others maintain that a young ant is actually trained to its domestic duties by its 

 older companions and that the well-known discrimination between friends and foes 

 is also a matter of education. 



However intelligent the social Hymenoptera may be in their way, they show 

 no signs of the power of abstract reasoning. Even ants, according to the experi- 

 ments of Lubbock, display profound stupidity in the face of novel emergencies 

 when tiiey might extricate themselves by abstract reasoning of the simplest kind. 

 The thoughts of an ant or a bee seem to be limited to simple associations of con- 

 crete things. 



There are two leading theories as to the origin of instinct. Lamarck, Romanes, 

 and their followers have regarded instinct as inherited habit; have supposed that 

 instincts have originated by the relegation to the reflex type of. actions that at first 

 were rational, and that instincts represent the accumulated results of ancestral 

 experience. This habit theory, however, has little to support it, and assumes the 

 inheritance of acquired characters — which has not been proved. 



The selection theory of Darwin, Weismann, Morgan, and others has much in 

 its favor. It regards reflex acts as primitive, as the raw material from which natu- 

 ral selection, as the chief factor, has effected those combinations that are termed 

 instincts. 



Finally, there is a growing tendency to regard instinct as the basis of intelli- 

 gence. With the advent of consciousness, involving memory and choice, instinct 

 ceases to be blind and reason begins. 



