THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



With our domestic animals the case is different; 

 they are useful to us mainly on account of their 

 acquired habits. We have trained them to do our 

 bidding. The horse in the harness or under the 

 saddle, the ox in the yoke or hitched to the plough 

 or the cart, the dog trained to point, to retrieve, to 

 trail, the performing animals in the circus or in the 

 menagerie, all act from acquired habits. Their 

 natural instincts have been eradicated or greatly 

 modified. We have trained them to our own wills, as 

 we train a tree to some arbitrary pattern. If let alone 

 a few years, the clipped tree will go back to its natu- 

 ral form; the domestic animal, if given a chance, 

 quickly reverts to the state of its wild brothers. Man 

 himself, in war, in camps in the woods, or among the 

 mines, tends to revert to a state of barbarism. 



In calling instinct inherited habit we do not, of 

 course, clear up the mystery. Perhaps we only sub- 

 stitute one mystery for another. There remains the 

 mystery of inheritance, which we think we can track 

 to certain parts of the nucleus of the germ cell, and 

 there our analysis stops. 



The new psychology is confusing when it says, 

 speaking through its magazine exponent, that there 

 is no such thing as instinct, but " instincts there are 

 by the score." There is no such thing as maternal 

 instinct, it says, but only " impulses that have to 

 do with young, which females possess and males 

 lack"; no such thing as a homing instinct, but 

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