INSTINCT 347 



formed, is usually said to be instinctive. But I could 

 show that none of these characters are universal. A lit- 

 tle dose of judgment or reason, as Pierre Huber ex- 

 presses it, often comes into play, even with animals 

 low in the scale of nature. 



Frederick Cuvier and several of the older metaphy- 

 sicians have compared instinct with habit. This compari- 

 son gives, I think, an accurate notion of the frame of 

 mind under which an instinctive action is performed, but 

 not necessarily of its origin. How unconsciously many 

 habitual actions are performed, indeed not rarely in direct 

 opposition to our conscious will! yet they may be modi- 

 fied by the will or reason. Habits easily become associ- 

 ated with other habits, with certain periods of time and 

 states of the body. When once acquired, they often 

 remain constant throughout life. Several other points 

 of resemblance between instincts and habits could be 

 pointed out. As in repeating a well-known song, so in 

 instincts, one action follows another by a sort of rhythm; 

 if a person be interrupted in a song, or in repeating any- 

 thing by rote, he is generally forced to go back to re- 

 cover the habitual train of thought; so P. Huber found 

 it was with a caterpillar, which makes a very complicated 

 hammock; for if he took a caterpillar which had com- 

 pleted its hammock up to, say, the sixth stage of con- 

 struction, and put it into a hammock completed up only 

 to the third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed the 

 fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of construction. If, how- 

 ever, a caterpillar were taken out of a hammock made 

 up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into 

 one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its 

 work was already done for it, far from deriving any ben- 



