CHAPTER XVIII 



THE INSTINCTS AND THE ACQUIREMENTS OF MAN 



The essential difference between Man and the brutes Reason in the 

 brutes The substitution of reason for instinct The instincts of 

 Man The sexual instinct The parental instinct The instinct for 

 food Imitativeness The sporting instinct The stereotyping of 

 mental acquirements Its advantages and disadvantages. 



393. MAN'S splendid power of learning through experience, 

 and of applying the contents of his memory to forecast and 

 mould the future is his peculiar glory. It is this that dis- 

 tinguishes him from and raises him above all other animals. 

 This it is that makes him man. This it is that has enabled him 

 to conquer the whole world and adapt himself to a million 

 conditions of life. Consider how immense are his mental 

 acquirements during his long passage from infancy to old 

 age. A language alone needs a vast memory, to communi- 

 cate by language a vast development of reason. With the 

 exception of the evolution of life and consciousness, this 

 evolution of the power of making mental acquirements is the 

 most important phase of evolution in the whole history of 

 life. It alone renders all the stages of intellectuality possible. 

 Memory, forethought, induction, deduction, reason in all its 

 grades and in every sense, imagination, conception, discrimin- 

 ation, comparison, association, habit, all depend on it. 



394. Reason is a word which has been used with many 

 meanings. Various writers, giving this or that signification 

 to the term, have maintained that man alone, of all animals, 

 possesses reason. We have used it as synonymous with the 

 general power of drawing inferences, a faculty which clearly 

 depends on memory. Obviously all animals that have the 

 power of making mental acquirements, of storing data in their 

 memories, must possess the power of drawing inferences from 

 them; otherwise their stores of experience would be useless, 

 and the power of making them would not have been evolved, 



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