RATIONALISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 247 



owner of the birds (in captivity), it is at once put back 

 into its place. 



Instincts have often been confounded with reflex 

 actions ; and it is, indeed, not always easy or possible to 

 differentiate them. A moth flying to a candle has been 

 called an instinct ; but Prof Loeb shows that it is pro- 

 bably nothing but a mechanical response to the excite- 

 ment of light. ^ 



V. Hartmann would define instinct as " purposeful 

 action without consciousness ". This definition, however, 

 would apply equally well to shrinking in one's sleep from 

 a touch, or a frog trying to remove a drop of acid from 

 its leg, without a head, or swimming without a brain ; 

 those being obviously reflex actions. 



Darwin's greatest difficulty was the cell-making in- 

 stinct of worker bees, which can never leave offspring 

 to inherit the habit. 



A very simple theory will explain it. Eimer has 

 shown that when a female grub, which would become a 

 worker, is made to become a queen bee, she attains not 

 all the many points of structure but the physiological 

 peculiarities of a queen. 



In other words, these latter are potentially present in 

 every female egg the queen lays. 



Hence, all that is required to be assumed is that the 

 ancestral queen used wax to make hexagonal cells and 

 collected honey and pollen ; but queens have now ceased 

 to do these things, it having been taken over by the 

 workers, in whom these traits are hereditary. In the 

 case of wasps of the genus Vespa, not only do the 

 workers but the queen still makes hexagonal cells. 



My sole object in discussing thus briefly the question 



^Comparative Physiology of the Brain, pp. 179-183. 



