15a COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. ii. 



manently organized in the animal structure, and tliey are 

 transmitted, with the accompanying capacities of action, 

 from generation to generation. Here we see " indissohibly 

 connected psychical states existing where there are per- 

 petually repeated experiences of the external relations to 

 •which they answer." 



The phenomena of instinct are more distinctly psychical 

 than those of reflex action. " While simple reflex action i"? 

 common to the internal visceral processes and to the pro- 

 cesses of external adjustment, instinct is not. There are no 

 instincts displayed by the kidneys, the lungs,. the liver: they 

 occur only among the actions of that nervo-muscular appa- 

 ratus which is the agent of psychical life." Instinct, more- 

 over, implies the coordination of a large number of stimuli 

 with the answering movements, and herein is its chief dif- 

 ference from reflex action, — a difference in degree only. The 

 newly-hatched fly-catcher, in seizing a fly, shows " en exact 

 appreciation of distance, as well as a power of precisely 

 regulating the muscular movements in accordance with it." 

 The number of impressions and movements here coordinated 

 is so considerable that it would take several pages to describe 

 them thorouglily. Here certain systems of transit-lines, 

 involved in the establishment of a correspondence in space, 

 are wrought by nutrition in the animal's nervous system, so 

 completely that when the outer relation occurs the discharge 

 instantly takes place along the pre-established channels, and 

 the adjustment is made. There is an intricate compounding 

 of reflex actions, involving the assistance of the brain ; for if 

 the cerebellum be sliced, the fly-catching can no longer be 

 perfornfed. Intricate, however, as the combination is, it is a 

 special and unvarying one which has been continually re- 

 peated during the whole lifetime of countless ancestral fly- 

 catchers, so that there is nothing strange in the fact that it is 

 completely organized at birth. The principle is the same as 

 in the simpler phenomena of reflex action. Here, as before 



