680 P8TGH0L0GT. 



tions they acquire such a dread of man as to fly on his approach, and 

 that this dread is manifested by young as well as old. Now unless this 

 change be ascribed to the killing off of the least fearful, and the preser- 

 vation and multiplication of the more fearful, which, considering the 

 small number killed by man, is an inadequate cause, it must be ascribed 

 to accumulated experiences, and each experience must be held to have 

 a share in producing it. We must conclude that in each bird that es- 

 capes with injuries inflicted by man, or is alarmed by the outcries of 

 other members of the flock, . . . there is established an association of 

 ideas between the human aspect and the pains, direct and indirect, suf- 

 fered from human agency. And we must further conclude that the 

 state of consciousness which impels the bird to take flight is at first 

 nothing more than an ideal reproduction of those painful impressions 

 which before followed man's approach ; that such ideal reproduction 

 becomes more vivid and more massive as the painful experiences, direct 

 or sympathetic, increase ; and that thus tlie emotion, in its incipient 

 state, is nothing else than an aggregation of the revived pains before 

 experienced. As, in the course of generations, the young birds of this 

 race begin to display a fear of man before they have been injured by 

 him, it is an unavoidable inference that the nervous system of the race 

 has been organically modified by these experiences ; wehaye no choice 

 but to conclude that when a young bird is thus led to fly, it is because 

 the impression produced on its senses by the approaching man entails, 

 through an incipiently reflex action, a partial excitement of all those 

 nerves which, in its ancestors, had been excited under the like con- 

 ditions ; that this partial excitement has its accompanying painful con- 

 sciousness ; and that the vague painful consciousness thus arising con- 

 stitutes emotion proper — emotion nndecomposable into specific experi- 

 ences, and therefore seemingly homogeneous. If sztch be the expla- 

 nation of the fact in this case, then it is in all cases. If the emotion 

 is so generated here, then it is so generated throughout. If so, we must 

 perforce conclude that the emotional modifications displayed by dif- 

 ferent nations, and those higher emotions by which civilized are dis- 

 tinguished from savage, are to be accounted for on the same principle. 

 And, concluding this, we are led strongly to suspect that the emotions 

 in general have severally thus originated. " * 



Obviously the word ' emotion ' here means instinct as 

 well, — the actions we call instinctive are expressions or 

 manifestations of the emotions whose genesis Mr, Spencer 

 describes. Now if habit could thus bear fruit outside the 

 individual life, and if the modifications so painfully ac- 

 quired by the parents' nervous systems could be found 

 ready-made at birth in those of the young, it would be hard 



* Review of Bain in H. Spencer: Illustrations of Universal Progress 

 (New York, i864), pp. 311, 315. 



