ii THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 175 



life itself (especially when the embryo lives freely in 

 the form of a larva), many of the acts accomplished 

 must be referred to instinct. The most essential of 

 the primary instincts are really, therefore, vital pro 

 cesses. The potential consciousness that accompanies 

 them is generally actualized only at the outset of the 

 act, and leaves the rest of the process to go on by 

 itself. It would only have to expand more widely, 

 and then dive into its own depth completely, to be 

 one with the generative force of life. 



When we see in a living body thousands of cells 

 working together to a common end, dividing the task 

 between them, living each for itself at the same time 

 as for the others, preserving itself, feeding itself, 

 reproducing itself, responding to the menace of danger 

 by appropriate defensive reactions, how can we help 

 thinking of so many instincts ? And yet these are the 

 natural functions of the cell, the constitutive elements 

 of its vitality. On the other hand, when we see the 

 bees of a hive forming a system so strictly organized 

 that no individual can live apart from the others beyond 

 a certain time, even though furnished with food and 

 shelter, how can we help recognizing that the hive 

 is really, and not metaphorically, a single organism, 

 of which each bee is a cell united to the others by 

 invisible bonds ? The instinct that animates the bee 

 is indistinguishable, then, from the force that animates 

 the cell, or is only a prolongation of that force. In 

 extreme cases like this, instinct coincides with the work 

 of organization. 



Of course there are degrees of perfection in the same 

 instinct. Between the humble-bee and the honey-bee, 

 for instance, the distance is great ; and we pass from 

 one to the other through a great number of inter- 



