THE WAYS OF LIFE 201 



they would have made of the case of a hen which, after 

 several successive experiences of fostering ducklings, 

 involving inter alia an anxious flight on to a stone in the 

 middle of the pond, tried to lead her own chicks at a later 

 date to the water ! 



In the Middle Ages and later, all animal activities were 

 slumped together and ascribed to the ' faculty of instinct ', 

 and all human activities were, with equal futility, slumped, 

 and referred to the ' faculty of reason '. Instinct was 

 widely regarded as a divinely implanted capacity of doing 

 purposelike things without understanding or even intending 

 them. This vicious parenthesis of ' faculty psychology ' 

 led on to the extreme position of Descartes, who regarded 

 animals as automatic machines, in whose workings the 

 psychical substance plays no part. One must recognize 

 that in this extraordinary view he had a clear perception 

 of the strangely unplastic and stereotyped character of 

 instinctive behaviour. But he did not realize at all that 

 many animals are, apart from instinct altogether, very 

 actively and acutely intelligent. 



Through a number of notable men, and in different ways, 

 a strong reaction set in against the Church view and the 

 Schoolmen's view of animal instinct. It was pointed out 

 that human activities could not be defined off in bulk 

 as different in kind from animal activities. It was shown 

 that some forms of animal behaviour could not be described 

 except as intelligent, but that there was another kind of 

 animal behaviour on somewhat different lines, which might 

 be called instinctive. The reaction gradually led to the posi- 

 tion of men like Biichner, who maintained that instinct 

 was a term for the hereditary mental predispositions 

 towards particular sequences of behaviour predispositions 



