150 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. il 



an insect " ; and " a young pointer will point at a covey the 

 first time lie is taken afield," But in such cases as these, 

 where the cohesion of psychical states has not been deter- 

 mined by the experience of the individual, it has nevertheless 

 been determined by the experience of the race. That the 

 repetition of ancestral experiences must end in the automatic 

 cohesion of psychical states, is both demonstrable d priori 

 and illustrated by many facts. Birds living in islands un- 

 inhabited by men will not fly away when approached by 

 travellers, having none of that instinctive fear which " con- 

 tinued experience of human enmity has wrought" in other 

 birds. Yet in a few generations, these birds will acquire the 

 same instinctive fear. In many cases the offspring of a dog 

 that has been taught to beg will beg instinctively ; and 

 various peculiarities of demeanour, carefully impressed by 

 education upon sporting dogs, are manifested without educa- 

 tion by their descendants. Indeed it is familiar to breeders 

 that the dispositions and instincts of domestic animals can 

 be to a certain extent modified by training and selection, no 

 less than their physical constitutions.^ 



The physical explanation of the automatic cohesion of 

 psychical states implied in hereditary instinct, is not diffi- 

 cult at this stage of our inquiry. When the experience of 

 many past generations has uniformly contributed to establish 

 a certain arrangement of trans it -lines in the chief ganglia of 

 the animal, there must be a hereditary tendency for such 



* "How strongly these don^esKc instincts, habits, and dispositions are in- 

 herited, and how curiously they become mingled, is well shown when different 

 breeds of dogs are crossed, thus it is known that a cross with a bull-dog 

 has affected for many generations the courage and obstinacy of greyhounds ; 

 and a croGS with a greyhound has given to a whole family of shepherd-dogs 

 a tendency to imnt hares. These domestic instincts, when thus tested by 

 irossing, resemble natural instincts, which in a like manner become curiously 

 olended together, and for a long period exhibit traces of the instincts of 

 either parent : for example Le Itoy describes a dog, whose great-grandfather 

 was a wolf, and this dog showed a trace of its wild parentage only in one 

 way, by not coming in a straight line to his master, when called." — Darvdn, 

 On^n of Species, 6th edit., p. 210. 



