184 UNIVERSAL EVOLUTION 



meat, he can build a fire and cook it. These differ- 

 ences in action measure the difference in degree of 

 power between the nervous systems. Instinct stops 

 with its operations on things, it has no variety of doing 

 the same thing. It has but one mode, or choice, and 

 continues that method without variation. It is the 

 reaction of a brain in which no new short cuts are 

 formed by repeated effort. But intelligence seeks out 

 many methods, and is constantly storing up discrimina- 

 tions between relations, and records, in written lan- 

 guage, its discoveries. Instinct cannot follow it in these 

 achievements, and is helpless before the power of intel- 

 ligence in its ultimate use of the forces of materiality, 

 to subdue all lower organisms. Bergson says : ' ' Instinct 

 operates upon life, and intelligence on things." But he 

 is in the habit of using terms in a metaphysical sense, 

 as if the terms instinct, and intelligence, were person- 

 alities directing and planning the coi-stant phenomena 

 of life. For instance, he says: "The same instinct had 

 gone on complicating itself more and more in one direc- 

 tion, and along a straight line, etc." He holds that 

 instincts have not been acquired through inherited 

 habits of millions of generations, and retained by 

 natural selection, as instincts. He says, "there is no 

 need of such a view if we suppose a sympathy (in the 

 etymological sense of the word) between the Ammo- 

 phila and its victim, which teaches it from within, so 

 to say, concerning the vulnerability of the caterpillar. ' ' 

 Max Meyer would account for this by nervous reflex as 

 the cause within. It is to be presumed that each phil- 

 osopher expresses in such statements his own mental 

 make-up, or tendency. Bergson is an idealist, and 

 Meyer is a materialist by nature, and those who adopt 

 one view, or the other may be classified by the tenden- 



