n.] THE NATURE OF INSTINCT 175 



intelligence and instinct in forms almost pure. Why, 

 then, should instinct be resolvable into intelligent elements? 

 Why, even, into terms entirely intelligible? Is it not 

 obvious that to think here of the intelligent, or of the abso- 

 lutely intelligible, is to go back to the Aristotelian theory 

 of nature? No doubt it is better to go back to that than 

 to stop short before instinct as before an unfathomable 

 mystery. But, though instinct is not within the domain 

 of intelligence, it is not situated beyond the limits of mind. 

 In the phenomena of feeling, in unreflecting sympathy 

 and antipathy, we experience in ourselves — though under 

 a much vaguer form, and one too much penetrated with 

 intelligence — something of what must happen in the 

 consciousness of an insect acting by instinct. Evolu- 

 tion does but sunder, in order to develop them to the end, 

 elements which, at their origin, interpenetrated each 

 other. More precisely, intelligence is, before anything 

 else, the faculty of relating one point of space to another, 

 one material object to another; it applies to all things, 

 but remains outside them; and of a deep cause it perceives 

 only the effects spread out side by side. Whatever be 

 the force that is at work in the genesis of the nervous 

 system of the caterpillar, to our eyes and our intelligence 

 it is only a juxtaposition of nerves and nervous centres. 

 It is true that we thus get the whole outer effect of it. The 

 Ammophila, no doubt, discerns but a very little of that 

 force, just what concerns itself; but at least it discerns 

 it from within, quite otherwise than by a process of know- 

 ledge — by an intuition (lived rather than represented), 

 which is probably like what we call divining sympathy. 



A very significant fact is the swing to and fro of scientific 

 theories of instinct, from regarding it as intelligent to 

 regarding it as simply intelligible, or, shall I say, between 

 likening it to an intelligence "lapsed" and reducing it 



