INSTINCT 379 



628. Prompted by another 'inherited' 'inborn' impulse, the 

 caterpillar seeks its proper food. Yet another instinct prompts it 

 to inhabit such situations as afford concealment from its enemies. 

 Next, at a certain stage of its growth, an instinct prompts it to 

 provide shelter for its helpless pupal stage by spinning a cocoon 

 or by some other device which has been followed invariably by its 

 ancestors. As a butterfly, it is under the influence of an entirely 

 different set of instincts. Inhabiting an altogether different en- 

 vironment, it moves instinctively by means of other organs, adopts 

 new devices to escape its enemies, seeks and feeds in a different 

 way on different food, pursues the female and mates with her. 

 She, impelled by an instinct unfelt by the male, deposits her eggs 

 in one of the few spots in the vast and complex world in which 

 she moves in which her offspring will have a chance of surviving. 



629. The caterpillar has sense organs and a nervous system ; 

 we have every reason to believe that it feels. But there is little or 

 no evidence that it remembers or thinks. Memory would be little 

 use to it; therefore parsimonious nature bestows little or none. 

 Cast adrift in a hostile world, it must come into existence ready 

 armed for the battle of life. The necessity of following, by its 

 own unaided efforts, the right line of action is as pressing at the 

 beginning of life as subsequently. It has no time to learn, and 

 during the rapid and strange changes in its career little oppor- 

 tunity of acquiring knowledge which would beneficially affect its 

 future. Many of its most important actions, such as cocoon 

 building and mating, are done only once. Since memory and its 

 corollaries, comparison, discrimination, idealism, imagination, re- 

 flection, intelligence, reason, and all that they imply are most 

 developed in the higher animals and are imperceptible lower in 

 the scale, since they gradually increase in number, range, and 

 utility, they are clearly later and higher products of evolution than 

 instinct. Memory, itself, the faculty by means of which we learn, 

 arises under the stimulus of nutriment. Therefore it is ' inborn.' 

 But all that is stored in the memory, all the mental growth which 

 arises through its use and the use of its contents is 'acquired.' 

 Therefore intelligence and reason are 'acquirements.' A man 

 who has no memory, whose mind is blank of all that memory 

 supplies, and who, consequently, cannot compare, discriminate, or 

 perform any of the operations which the possession of a stored 

 memory would enable him to accomplish, is not intelligent. 1 The 

 only mental operations possible to him are sensations and instinc- 



1 See 762. 



