yo MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



I These few instances will serve to show that instinct is 

 jnot the mysteriously unerring guide that tradition has 

 Tnade of it. It is not invariably perfect from birth ; it 

 often needs and undergoes development in the lifetime of 

 the individual ; it often misleads its possessor, and, as we 

 shall show later, it is, at any rate in its higher forms, 

 capable of well-directed modifications. 



2. Indeed, instinctive action of the more plastic kind 

 bears at first sight all the signs and tokens of deliberate 

 purpose and .deliberate purpose iroplks intelligence. Can 

 we then regard instinct as a form of intelligence ? The 

 question would hardly be entertained by any psychologist, 

 but it may be well to assign briefly some of the reasons 

 for dismissing it. If we impute intelligence to an animal, 

 we do so on the same ground ultimately as that which 

 justifies us in imputing intelligence to another man. We 

 reason outwards to other men from ourselves, and similarly 

 we reason outwards to animals from men. And the test 

 of our reasonings is in the end the same corroboration of 

 our results by inferences proceeding from different data 

 and along different lines. Bearing these principles in 

 mind, we observe : 



a. Instinctive and intelligent actions are opposed in 

 their genesis. 



To grasp fully the nature of what he is doing, a man 

 must have some experience of it. Instinct, on the other 

 hand, is often almost perfect, and sometimes quite perfect, 

 without any experience at all. At that stage its action is, 

 even in an otherwise intelligent being, carried on without 

 consciousness of its end or its nature. Thus when an 

 otherwise intelligent youth falls in love for the first time, 

 he has little or no conception of what has befallen him, 

 until little by little he begins to compare his experiences 

 with what he has seen and heard and read. Then he 

 knows. To assume that a canary bred in captivity has a 

 conception of the nest which she builds is to suppose 

 something utterly opposed to that human experience which 

 is the real basis of the original assumption. Men do not 

 evolve conceptions out of nothing, in the way which the 

 canary would, according to the assumption, have to do. 



