SUMMER INDUSTRIES 125 



our own experience and from experiments made on animals, 

 some of them seem not to be attended with any central 

 consciousness at all, while of others it seems safer to say 

 that they do not rise to the focus of consciousness. 



On a third level are those activities which are called 

 instinctive. By which is meant that they are performed 

 in virtue of an inherited capacity ; that they require no 

 learning or experience, though they are usually improved 

 by both; that they are shared alike by all members of 

 the species, or, at least, by those of the same sex. Most 

 animal industries must be included here, though there is 

 sometimes a spice of intelligence intermingled in their per- 

 formance. The spinning of spiders, the comb-building of 

 bees, the paper-making of wasps, the agricultural industries 

 of ants, and so on, seem to be, for the most part at least, 

 instinctive. The animals are, so to speak, hereditarily wound 

 up to do what they do. They are born with a ready-made 

 power of doing certain things well. The difficulty is that 

 some animals learn with great rapidity, so that it is often 

 impossible without experiment to distinguish what is 

 instinctive from what has been intelligently learnt. When 

 a complex performance is gone through without a hitch 

 the very first time it is attempted, and in the absence 

 of any model, we may be fairly sure that it is instinctive, 

 unless the performer has given other evidence of a high 

 order of intelligence. Experiment may prove this, thus 

 Professor Lloyd Morgan has been particularly successful in 

 getting at pure instinct by his method of studying young 

 birds hatched in an incubator and brought up in isolation. 



On a fourth level are intelligent activities, which include 

 some animal activities and parts of others. Here a higher 

 note is struck. The animal is not only conscious, but 

 controlling and contriving. It adapts old means to new 

 ends, it profits by experience, it puts two and two together 



