INSTINCT 113 



is shown by the fact that animals are so exceedingly stupid 

 in everything not closely related to their instinctive in- 

 terests. A cat pays not the least attention to a multitude 

 of things going on around her, but the sight of a canary or 

 the noise made by a gnawing mouse puts her on the qui-vive. 

 Only a few objects have meaning; the rest do not form a 

 part of what might be called her effective environment; 

 to her they are non-existent. 



Not only in lower forms, but in the higher members of the 

 animal kingdom as well, intelligence may be said to be the 

 handmaid of instinct. Animals profit by experience in 

 order to live their life along the lines marked out for them 

 by their instinctive make-up, and whatever pleasure or 

 satisfaction their lives may bring is attained by following 

 their instinctive bent. "Why," asks James, in a significant 

 passage, "do the various animals do what seem to us such 

 strange things in the presence of such outlandish stimuli? 

 Why does the hen, for example, submit herself to the tedium 

 of incubating such a fearfully uninteresting set of objects as 

 a nestful of eggs, unless she have some prophetic inkling 

 of the result? The only answer is ad hominem. We can 

 only interpret the instincts of brutes by what we know of 

 instincts in ourselves. Why do men always lie down, when 

 they can, on soft beds rather than on hard floors? Why 

 do they sit around the stove on a cold day? . . . Why 

 does the maiden interest the youth so that everything about 

 her seems more important and significant than anything 

 else in the world? Nothing more can be said than that these 

 are human ways, and that every creature likes its own ways, 

 and takes to following them as a matter of course. Science 

 may come and consider these ways and find that most of 

 them are useful. But it is not for the sake of their utility 

 that they are followed, but because in following them we 



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