244 THE PRINCIPLES OF HEEED1TY 



403. Almost as beautiful as the child's instinct to play is 

 the mother's instinct to play with her child. This instinct, 

 also, is only seen in the higher animals, and in its greatest 

 development only in the highest. Sports the mother has 

 long abandoned now give her renewed pleasure. When we 

 watch any mother, brute or human, playing with her off- 

 spring, we see how perfectly all her actions are adapted to 

 develop just such traits in her offspring as will fit it for the 

 future battle of existence. The " wisdom," the " forethought," 

 of the brutes guided as it is by instinct seldom goes astray. 

 The wisdom of the woman so long as it is guided by pure 

 instinct is equally sure. It is only when she relies on her 

 own acquirements, which perhaps include many foolish tradi- 

 tions, that she is apt to do wrong. 



404. The power of making mental acquirements is, then, 

 a substitute in the higher animals, especially in man, for 

 many instincts, but an immensely superior substitute. And 

 when I use the word substitute I do not mean, merely that 

 in the higher animals reason has replaced instinct to a 

 greater or lesser extent. I mean more than this. I mean 

 the things we learn, and the peculiarities of character we 

 acquire during youth, become in time so stereotyped in us, 

 that did we not know their origin, we could not distinguish 

 them from true instincts. Thus though we learn to read, to 

 write, to knit, to sew, to carpenter, to lay bricks, and so 

 forth, with infinite difficulty, yet time and constant practice 

 render all these complicated actions so automatic that they 

 seem instinctive. No word is more abused than the word 

 instinct. We are told, for instance, that such and such a 

 man instinctively dodged a blow. He does not dodge it 

 instinctively. But the "human boy" when sporting has so 

 practised the dodging of blows that the action becomes 

 automatic in him, and remains so in the man. Again, people 

 say they liked or disliked some other person instinctively. 

 They are wrong. Even in the young child vague recollections 

 influence likes and dislikes. We hear of the instincts of 

 modesty, of morality, of altruism, of devotion, of patriotism, 

 and so forth. We shall see that there are no such instincts. 

 All these characters depend on something higher on the 



" plasticity " by Professor Mark Baldwin and others. But obviously an 

 animal that responds to the stimulus of use and experience by growing 

 actively in body and mind in directions that have been more or less 

 definitely fixed by Natural Selection, is something more than merely 

 plastic. I have thought it better, therefore, to adhere in the present 

 work to the more accurate if more clumsy expression. 



