348 SYMBIOGENESIS 



This is true also of organisms. The fact that all strenuous 

 organisms participate in a symbiogenetic union is also 

 important testimony to the essential uniformity of experience, 

 in spite of all differences of degree. 



With Prof. Eimer, I would say that the possibility of 

 reliance upon increasing division of labour and the resultant 

 security, i.e., upon correspondences (of domestic and biological 

 symbiosis), has rendered it possible for organisms to depute an 

 increasing share of activities once performed consciously and 

 voluntarily to the realm of the automatic (i.e., the unconscious 

 and involuntary) as soon as the corresponding faculties have 

 taken deep symbiogenetic root in the organism. That there is, 

 normally, a vast amount of such reliance on biological 

 symbiosis, on symbiogenesis and symbiogenetic momenta, 

 makes it all the easier to understand how the automatic 

 mechanism could gradually become perfected and increase in 

 importance, thus leaving the brain at liberty to work in other 

 directions, and to acquire new faculties. We can thus 

 rationally understand all such development as the fruit of 

 work done and as the necessary complement of such work. 



Such acquired automatic actions (continues Eimer) can be inherited. 

 Instinct is inherited faculty, especially is inherited habit. Or to state 

 it more accurately, instinct is the power of habitually acting without 

 reflection so as to attain a given object in such a way as intelligence 

 or even reason might dictate in response to internal stimuli depending 

 on the condition of the body, and in some cases to external stimuli also. 



No other scientific explanation of instinct seems to me possible. 



He goes even further in adumbrating the symbiogenetic 

 view thus : 



The view I have given of the nature of mental faculties and of 

 their origin, and particularly this view of the nature of instinct, will 

 appear the more probable the more the reader assimilates and under- 

 stands the consequences of the idea that the organic world is a connected 

 whole, and that in particular the most nearly related forms are clearly 

 to be regarded as differentiated by division of labour, as organs of a 

 larger organisation. 



As regards the much-debated and ever-fascinating case of 

 the Cuckoo, Prof. Eimer states his belief thus: 



