INSTINCT AND REASON 401 



shell itself into his mouth. This act was not instinctive. 

 It was the work of pure reason. Evidently his race was 

 not familiar with the use of eggs and had acquired no in- 

 stincts regarding them. He would do it better next time. 

 Reason is an inefficient agent at first, a weak tool; but 

 when it is trained it becomes an agent more valuable and 

 more powerful than any instinct. 



The monkey Jocko tried to eat the egg offered him in 

 much the same way that Bob did, but, not liking the taste, 

 he threw it away. 



The confusion of highly perfected instinct with intellect 

 is very common in popular discussions. Instinct grows 

 weak and less accurate in its automatic obedience as the 

 intellect becomes available in its place. Both intellect and 

 instinct are outgrowths from the simple reflex response to 

 external conditions. But instinct insures a single definite 

 response to the corresponding stimulus. The intellect has 

 a choice of responses. In its lower stages it is vacillating 

 and ineffective ; but as its development goes on it becomes 

 alert and adequate to the varied conditions of life. It 

 grows with the need for improvement. It will therefore 

 become impossible for the complexity of life to outgrow 

 the adequacy of man to adapt himself to its conditions. 



Many animals currently believed to be of high intelli- 

 gence are not so. The fur-seal, for example, finds it way 

 back from the long swim of two or three thousand miles 

 through a foggy and stormy sea, and is never too late or too 

 early in arrival. The female fur-seal goes two hundred 

 miles to her feeding grounds in summer, leaving the pup 

 on the shore. After a week or two she returns to find him 

 within a few rods of the rocks where she had left him. 

 Both mother and young know each other by call and by 

 odor, and neither is ever mistaken, though ten thousand 

 other pups and other mothers occupy the same rookery. 

 But this is not intelligence. It is simply instinct, because 

 it has no element of choice in it. Whatever its ancestors 



