ANIMAL INSTINCTS. 157 



be by pursuing this common path. As far as I can see, 

 there is none other open to us. 



I have spoken of induced habits in man and the 

 higher animals as often acquiring an instinctive cha- 

 racter, and even becoming transmissible to offspring. 

 The instincts of man, as the highest in the scale, form 

 a very curious but difficult topic made more difficult 

 by the larger intelligence blended with them, and 

 further perplexed by those innate propensities and 

 idiosyncrasies, intellectual and moral, which give 

 diversity to human character, and often exercise a 

 compulsion upon it which no reason or will can take 

 account of or resist. It is not easy by definition to 

 dissever these propensities from instincts. But while 

 at once the most familiar and the most inexplicable 

 phenomena in the philosophy of mind, they will be 

 seen to belong chiefly to individual life ; and though 

 sometimes transmitted to offspring, are not, like true 

 instincts, subject to any common or certain law. The 

 animals nearest to man in intelligence have, like him, 

 individual propensities, but these more closely inter- 

 woven with the peculiar instincts of the spQcies. As 

 we descend in the scale these individualities gradually 

 disappear. The instincts become more definite in kind, 

 identical for each species, and at the lowest point 

 limited seemingly to the simple necessities of existence 

 and reproduction. 



Other causes make it difficult to define the special 

 instincts of man. The voluntary and involuntary func- 

 tions, and those of mind and body respectively, are so 

 variously interblended, that even consciousness fails to 



