v THE MENTAL PHENOMENA OF ANIMALS 131 



stinct which teaches a man to avoid the fire, as much as that 

 which teaches a bird, with such exactness, the art of incuba- 

 tion and the whole economy and order of its nursery." 

 (IV. pp. 125, 126). 



The parallel here drawn between the " avoid- 

 ance of a fire " by a man and the incubatory 

 instinct of a bird is inexact. The man avoids 

 fire when he has had experience of the pain pro- 

 duced by burning; but the bird incubates the 

 first time it lays eggs, and therefore before it has 

 had any experience of incubation. For the com- 

 parison to be admissible, it would be necessary 

 that a man should avoid fire the first time he saw 

 it, which is notoriously not the case. 



The term " instinct " is very vague and ill- 

 defined. It is commonly employed to denote any 

 action, or even feeling, which is not dictated by 

 conscious reasoning, whether it is, or is not, the 

 result of previous experience. It is " instinct " 

 which leads a chicken just hatched to pick up a 

 grain of corn; parental love is said to be " instinct- 

 ive"; the drowning man who catches at a straw 

 does it "instinctively"; and the hand that acci- 

 dentally touches something hot is drawn back by 

 " instinct." Thus " instinct " is made to cover 

 everything from a simple reflex movement, in 

 which the organ of consciousness need not be at 

 all implicated, up to a complex combination of acts 

 directed towards a definite end and accompanied 

 by intense consciousness. 

 152 



