320 INSTINCT. [Chap. VTTL 



it is performed, is usually said to be instinctive. But 

 I could show that none of these characters are universal. 

 A little dose of judgment or reason, as Pierre Hubei 

 expresses it, often comes into play, even with animals 

 low in the scale of nature. 



Frederick Cuvier and several of the older meta- 

 physicians have compared instinct with habit. This 

 comparison gives, I think, an accurate notion of the 

 frame of mind under which an instinctive action is 

 performed, but not necessarily of its origin. How 

 unconsciously many habitual actions are performed, 

 indeed not rarely in direct opposition to our con- 

 scious will ! yet they may be modified by the will or 

 reason. Habits easily become associated with other 

 habits, with certain periods of time, and states of the 

 body. When once acquired, they often remain constant 

 throughout life. Several other points of resemblance 

 between instincts and habits could be pointed out. As 

 in repeating a well-known song, so in instincts, one 

 action follows another by a sort of rhythm ; if a person 

 be interrupted in a song, or in repeating anything by 

 rote, he is generally forced to go back to recover the 

 habitual train of thought; so P. Huber found it was 

 with a caterpillar, which makes a very complicated 

 hammock ; for if he took a caterpillar which had com- 

 pleted its hammock up to, say, the sixth stage of construc- 

 tion, and put it into a hammock completed up only to 

 the third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed the 

 fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of construction. If, how- 

 ever, a caterpillar were taken out of a hammock made 

 up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into 

 one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its 

 work w^ already done for it, far from deriving any 



