PLAY AND INSTINCT. 37 



cases whose enumeration would fill a whole book, instinct 

 can not be the cause or the occasion of a single one of 

 such actions." * 



The wealth of examples with which the author clev- 

 erly overwhelms us might be convincing to an uncritical 

 reader. In truth, however, Biichner combats only the 

 most extreme conception of instinct, that is hardly to be 

 taken seriously in our day; just as in his antagonism 

 to theology and metaphysics he attacks with his ma- 

 terialistic weapons only the extremest orthodoxy and the 

 most abstruse speculation, but in such a manner that 

 an unlearned reader might well get the impression 

 that theology and metaphysics generally had received 

 their death blow. What Biichner refutes is the idea 

 of a direct and miraculous imparting by God to the ani- 

 mals of absolutely inflexible and inerrant instincts. It 

 is surely possible to reject this view and yet believe in 

 an instinct which acts under normal conditions suitably 

 to ends, as inborn capacity in man and beast, without 

 individual experience and without a knowledge of the 

 end, but which may vary under different circumstances, 

 and become in abnormal cases so unsuited to the sup- 

 posed end that it may be said to " err." Moreover, 

 Biichner and the other opponents of instinct can by 

 no means claim that their idea is altogether contrary 

 to the pre-Darwinian view, for the extreme instinct 

 theory briefly outlined above was not by any means uni- 

 versally held even before Darwin. Thus Reimarus, who 

 has been quoted already, and who was easily the most 

 influential animal psychologist of his time, his Gen- 

 eral Observations on the Impulses of Animals pass- 



* L. Biichner, Aus dem Geistesleben der Thiere, third edition, 

 Leipsic, 1880, p. £6. 



