INSTINCT DISTINGUISHED FROM INTELLIGENCE. 



the most complicated, and producing its effects at once in the 

 most perfect manner and without any internal effort on the part 

 of the agent, intelligence, on the contrary, is a faculty consisting 

 of various distinct operations depending on experience and sus- 

 ceptible of indefinite improvement by exercise. The perceptions 

 received from external objects are the data upon which it is 

 exercised. These perceptions are capable of being revived and 

 identified by the faculty called memory. Thus, having once per- 

 ceived any given object, it is identified upon its recurrence by the 

 consciousness that the perception it produces is the same as that 

 which was formerly produced by it. Thus, objects once seen are 

 known when seen again. 



Memory is essential to almost all other acts of intelligence, the 

 most simple of which is that by which the mind infers that any 

 effect which has been once produced will be again reproduced by 

 the same agent under like circumstances ; and the oftener such 

 effects are observed to be reproduced, the more strong is the 

 conviction that they will reappear. 



5. Instinctive acts are done without any perception or con- 

 sciousness of their consequences on the part of the agent. Intel- 

 ligent acts, on the contrary, are performed not only with a 

 consciousness of their consequences, but because of that con- 

 sciousness. They are performed precisely with a view to produce 

 the effects which are known by previous experience to have 

 resulted from them. 



6. It must not be supposed that instinct and intelligence can- 

 not coexist, or that the animal endowed with either is necessarily 

 deprived of the other. It is certain, on the contrary, that most 

 animals are more or less gifted with both. In man, constituting 

 the highest link in the chain of animal organisation, the faculty 

 of intelligence predominates in an immense proportion over that 

 of instinct. In passing to the next link, the relation between 

 these faculties undergoes a change so enormous, that naturalists 

 have regarded man not merely as a species of animal, but as an 

 order of organised beings apart, being the sole genus of his order 

 and the sole species of his genus. 



7. In descending from link to link downwards along the chain 

 of animal organisation, the play of intelligence is observed to bear 

 a less and less proportion to that of instinct, until we arrive at the 

 last links, where all trace of intelligence is lost, and animal life 

 becomes a mere system of phenomena produced by instinctive 

 impulses. 



8. The question of the relative provinces and play of instinct 

 and intelligence in the animal world, has been agitated among 

 philosophers and naturalists from the earliest epochs down to our 



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