THE KEY TO ANIMAL BEHAVIOR 



only an attachment for some particular place to 

 which the animal has learned the way. In short, 

 "instinct is not a faculty but a reflex." 



What men possess and share with the lower orders 

 are impulses — involuntary, spontaneous impulses 

 to do certain specific things; and this is what we 

 mean by instinct. The " impulses that have to do 

 with young, which females possess and males lack " 

 — what is that but the maternal instinct? It is not 

 acquired, it is latent in the female, and is developed 

 when her young are born. In the insect world it is 

 active before the young are born, and leads to solici- 

 tude about the young that the mother is never to 

 see. There is the nesting instinct in birds, which is 

 stronger in the female than in the male; the stalking 

 instinct in the cat is stronger than it is in the dog. 

 We form an idea of these various unconscious re- 

 sponses or reactions to external conditions, and we 

 call it instinct. 



Can we argue that there is no such thing as the 

 mating instinct among animals, from the fact that 

 it works differently in different species? There may 

 not be such a thing as the "homing instinct," in the 

 sense in which we used to believe there was in pre- 

 evolutionary days — a blind impulse that carries an 

 animal back home unerringly, and that acts inde- 

 pendently of, sight or sense. Though this is still a 

 mooted point, I do not believe that a wild animal 

 ever gets lost, though we know domestic ones do. 

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