330 BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



habit that becomes automatic, from this point of view, is not 

 an action on the way to becoming an instinct, but action pre- 

 ceded and rendered possible by mstinct. Habits appear as 

 the uses of instinct organization which have been learned by 

 experience. 



8. The suggestion that intelligence emerges from blind 

 instinct, although nothing new, will appear to some as a com- 

 plete reductio adabsurdum. But evolution points unmistakably 

 to instinct as nascent mind, and we discover no other source of 

 psychogenetic continuity. As far back as we can go in the 

 history of organisms, in the simplest forms of living proto- 

 plasm, we find the sensory element along with the other funda- 

 mental properties, and this element is the central factor in the 

 evolution of instinct, and it remains the central factor in all 

 higher psychic development. It would be strange if, with this 

 factor remaining one and the same throughout, organizing 

 itself in sense organs of the keenest powers and in the most 

 complex nerve mechanisms known in the animal world it 

 would be strange, I say, if, with such continuity on the side of 

 structure, there should be discontinuity in the psychic activi- 

 ties. Such discontinuity would be nothing less than the nega- 

 tion of evolution. 



9. We are apt to contrast the extremes of instinct and intel- 

 ligence to emphasize the blindness and inflexibility of the one 

 and the consciousness and freedom of the other. It is like 

 contrasting the extremes of light 'and dark and forgetting all 

 the transitional degrees of twilight. In so doing we make the 

 hiatus so wide that derivation of one extreme from the other 

 seems about as hopeless as the evolution of something from 

 nothing. That is the last pit of self-confounding philosophy. 



Instinct is blind ; so is the highest human wisdom blind. 

 The distinction is one of degree. There is no absolute blind- 

 ness on the one side, and no absolute wisdom on the other. 

 Instinct is a dim sphere of light, but its dimness and outer 

 boundary are certainly variable ; intelligence is only the same 

 dimness improved in various degrees. 



When we say instinct is blind, we really mean nothing more 

 than that /'/ is blind to certain utilities which we can see. But 



