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 withit. . . . Initsearliest formssightis, 
° 
