Habit and Instinct. 427 



has no more apparent bearing upon the activities of their 

 after-life than the feeding of our grubs has on the duties of 

 ant-life. And although we must remember," he might 

 continue, ''that these large animals do not have the 

 advantage which we possess of awaking suddenly, as by a 

 new birth, to their full faculties, still, as they grow older, 

 now one and now another of their instinctive activities are 

 unfolded and manifested. They fall into the routine of life 

 with little or no training as the period proper to the various 

 instincts arrives. If learning thereof there be, it has at 

 present escaped our observation. And such intelligence as 

 their activities evince (and many of them do show remark- 

 able adaptation to uniform conditions of life) would seem 

 to be rather ancestral than of the present time ; as is 

 shown by the fact that many of the adaptations are directed 

 rather to past conditions of life than to those which now 

 hold good. In the presence of new emergencies to which 

 their instincts have not fitted them, these poor men are 

 often completely at a loss. We cannot but conclude, there- 

 fore, that, although shown under somewhat different and 

 less favourable conditions, instinct occupies fully as large 

 a space in the psychology of man as it does in that of the 

 ant, while their intelligence is far less unerring and, there- 

 fore, markedly inferior to our own." 



Of course, the views here attributed to the ant are very 

 absurd. But are they much more absurd than the views 

 of those who, on the evidence which we at present possess, 

 attribute all the varied activities of ant-life to instinct? 

 Take the case of the ecitons, or military ants, or the 

 harvesting ants, or the ants that keep draught-bugs as 

 beasts of burden : have we sufficient evidence to enable 

 us to affirm that these activities are purely instinctive and 

 not habitual ? That they are to a large extent innate, few 

 are likely to deny ; but then our own habitual acts have a 

 basis that is, to a very large extent, innate. The question 

 is not whether they have an innate basis, but whether 

 all the varied manoeuvres of the military ants, for example, 

 are displayed to the full without any learning or imitation. 



