THE PURPOSE OF YOUTH 231 



was taken from its mother when it was just able to see, and not 

 nearly strong enough to stand upright on its legs. It was born 

 very early in the year, in what turned out to be a cold spring, and 

 for at least three months it had no opportunity of seeing either 

 another caracal, or even any kind of cat. It lived entirely with 

 human beings. It was accustomed to be washed and brushed care- 

 fully, and yet as soon as it was strong enough, it began to lick its 

 own paws, to wet them and use them to wash its face, precisely 

 in the fashion of its parents and of all their ancestors and of the 

 whole tribe of cats from time immemorial. It is easy to misin- 

 terpret instincts and to think of them as intelligent, or as meaning 

 more than they do. A well-known naturalist has related that once 

 he passed straight from stroking his dog to a litter of kittens two 

 'days old and still blind. As soon as he touched them, the tiny 

 things began to hiss and spit, and he explained this as an instance 

 of the instinctive enmity of cats for dogs. But this was reading 

 too much into it. The spitting of the kittens was a generalised 

 reaction to sudden disturbance. Young ocelots, leopards or caracals 

 will hiss and spit at any unknown touch or smell. In a beautiful 

 passage in one of his plays, M. Francois de Curel describes some 

 one watching rats playing in the moonlight in a courtyard shadowed 

 by plane-trees. Suddenly a large leaf flutters down from a bough 

 and the scared rats bolt in every direction. You are not to laugh 

 at them and think of them as silly, being scared by a shadow. The 

 plane leaf might have been some nocturnal bird of prey, and the 

 rat that waited to investigate the danger would not have lived to 

 benefit by the experience it had gained. 



Instincts, whether they are complicated, like the spinning of a 

 web, or simple, like the sudden response to a disturbance, have not 

 to be learned and imply neither intelligence nor consciousness. 

 They either fit a very precise set of conditions, and if these are not 

 present they break down, or they are so vague and generalised that 

 they are not easy to distinguish from processes with which the 

 brain has nothing to do. If an unpleasant substance such as an 

 acid be applied to the leg of a frog, it will pull the leg away ; if the 

 leg be held, it will apply the other leg to the affected spot, and try 

 to rub the acid off. Such behaviour we certainly regard as a 

 simple kind of protective instinct, but, as it takes place as precisely 

 in a frog which has had its cerebrum destroyed as in an undamaged 

 animal, probably all such instincts are combinations, more or less 

 complicated, of the direct physical responses to stimulation which 



