116 THE EVOLUTION OF INSTINCT 



ligent experience, instinct was conceived by some writers as 

 due to the gradual automatizing of such experience by 

 frequent repetition; in the words of G. H. Lewes, instinct 

 is "lapsed intelligence," a view which makes intelligence 

 first in order of appearance and instinct a secondary result 

 of a sort of psychic degeneration. 



As Whitman has urged, according to the doctrine of 

 Lewes, "we should expect to find the lowest animals free 

 from instinct and possessed of pure intelligence. In the 

 higher forms we should expect to see intelligence lapsing 

 more and more into pure instinct." As every student of 

 animal behavior now knows, we find just the reverse. 

 Among low forms behavior is all but exclusively of the reflex 

 type. Passing up the animal series we find intelligence 

 gradually growing upon instinctive foundations. "In higher 

 forms not a single case of intelligence lapsing into instinct 

 is known. In forms that give indubitable evidence of 

 intelligence we do not see conscious reflection crystallizing 

 into instinct, but we do find instinct coming more and more 

 under -the sway of intelligence." 



Herbert Spencer, who was keenly alive to the difficulties 

 of the theory of lapsed intelligence as an explanation of the 

 origin of instinct in general, put forward an ingenious specu- 

 lation in which he attempted to derive instinct from reflex 

 action and the inheritance of acquired associations between 

 reflexes. In order to illustrate how an instinct might arise 

 he takes a low aquatic creature with rudimentary eyes. 

 "Sensitive as such eyes are only to marked changes in the 

 quantity of light, they can be affected by opaque bodies 

 moving in the surrounding water, only when such bodies 

 approach close to them. But bodies carried by their motion 

 very near to the organism will, by their further motion, be 

 brought in contact with it. . . . In its earliest forms sight is, 



