312. THE EVOLUTION OF ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR 
It matters not if the particular form assumed by play and 
experimentation be largely dependent on instinctive tendencies. 
For all the phenomena of instinct, profoundly organic as are 
the modes of behaviour comprised under this head, definite as 
are the inherited co-ordinations in the most typical examples 
of its occurrence, have also, except in some doubtful cases, a 
conscious aspect. At any rate this is the case in so far as 
instinctive response forms the hereditary basis on which is 
reared a more nicely adjusted intelligent edifice, in so far 
as instinctive procedure is subsequently modified and guided 
by acquired experience, in so far as there creeps in that 
“little dose of judgment” which Huber found in bees, Lord 
Avebury attributes to ants, Dr. Peckham sees in spiders and 
solitary wasps, and all observers find in birds and mammals. 
For if in these cases instinctive behaviour were unconscious, 
it would, as such, remain outside experience ; and if outside 
experience, there could be no data on which consciousness 
could base any modification of inherited behaviour, no 
opportunity of taking up the ready-formed responses into the 
mental synthesis and utilizing them for the wider ends of 
intelligent purpose. 
In social behaviour there is a reciprocity of suggestion 
between the members of the community. And such sugges- 
tion is operative through an appeal to consciousness. How- 
ever instinctive the forms of procedure may be in social 
insects, there remains much beyond which is hard to explain 
on the hypothesis that there is, in them, nothing analogous to 
a conscious situation ; while in such vertebrates as birds and 
mammals we cannot but believe that consciousness is the main 
determinant of much behaviour which seems to imply the 
germs, or more than the germs, of sympathy. The little 
monkey I saw in Hamburg cuddling up caressingly to a 
wounded companion, must surely have experienced a conscious 
situation analogous to that which prompts a child to nestle 
alongside her companion in distress. And he who has seen no 
signs of sympathy in dogs, has either watched their behaviour 
in vain, or is himself lacking in sympathy. 
