ON INSTINCT. 



233 



very accurate description of a somewhat singular orang-otang,* he suf- 

 ficiently unfolds his opinion, that instinct consists of ideas which do not 

 originate from sensation, but flow immediately from the brain, and are 

 truly innate. His words are as follows : " the understanding may have 

 ideas without the aid of the senses ; two-thirds of the brute creation are 

 moved by ideas which they do not owe to their sensations, but which 

 flow immediately from their brain. Instinct constitutes this order of 

 phenomena : it is composed of ideas truly innate, in which the senses 

 ihave never had the smallest share." There is a perplexity in this passage, 

 which I am surprised at in the writings of so exact a physiologist : it 

 first confounds instincts with ideas, as other philosophers have confound- 

 ed them with feelings ; and next affirms that ideas may flow from the 

 brain without the aid of the external senses. That the " understanding 

 may have ideas without the aid of the senses," I admit ; but then it cannot 

 have them from the brain, this being the very foundation and fountain 

 of the senses ; that from which they rise, and that in which they ter- 

 minate. The understanding may, undoubtedly, have ideas from the ex- 

 ercise of its own proper powers alone, but this can only be the case with 

 pure intellectual beings, and to assimilate the faculty of instinct with a 

 faculty of this exalted character, is to clothe brutes with endowments su- 

 perior to those of mankind ; it is to elevate the orang-otang above an 

 Aristotle or a Bacon. 



Hence M. Dupont de Nemours, in an article read before the National 

 institute in 1807, advises to drop the term instinct altogether, as the only 

 means of avoiding the rocks on some of which every writer has ship- 

 wrecked himself. He asserts, that there is in fact no such thing in ex- 

 istence : and that every action which has hitherto been described under 

 such name, is the mere result of intelligence, of thought, habit, example, 

 or the association of ideas. But this is only to revive, in a new form, the 

 theory of Darwin or of Smellie ; while it is only necessary to advert to 

 the explanatory examples offered by M. Dupont himself, to see that many 

 of them are utterly incapable, by any ingenuity whatever, of being re- 

 solved into a principle either of intelligence or of mechanism. t 



Nothing, therefore, is clearer than that the prmciple of instinct has 

 hitherto never been explicitly pointed out, nor even the term itself precisely 

 defined ; it has been derived from mechanical powers, from mental powers, 

 from both together, and from an imaginary intermediate essence, supposed 

 equally to pervade all embodied matter, and to give it form and structure- 

 It has been made sometimes to include the sensations, sometimes the pas- 

 sions, sometimes the reason, and sometimes the ideas : it has sometimes 

 been restricted to animals, and sometimes extended to vegetable life. J 



* Annales du Museum et d' Hist. Nat. torn. xri. p. 46. 

 t Magazine Encyclopedique, Feb. 1807, p. 437. 



I Dr. Hancock has lately published a very elaborate volume upon this subject, in which he 

 takes a just view of the instinctive powers of animals, and is half-disposed to allow the same 

 faculty to plants. But in merely distinguishing this faculty from reason, in the same way in 

 which he distinguishes what have hitherto been called innate principles, a moral sense or fa- 

 culty, light of nature, divine reason, as contra -distinguished from human reason, spiritual 

 power, internal teaching, and even impulse and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, all which he 

 contemplates as intelligences of a like kind, or to adopt his own words, "which we can 

 only regard as an emanation of divine wisdom," he has so completely generalized the sub- 

 ject, not to say apparently blended into a common principle powers which have usually been ~ 

 regarded as specitically discrepant from each other, — even allowing the existence of the 

 whole of them, and that they all flow, as in such case they must necessarily do, from the same 

 ahnighty source of being,— that the peculiar nature of the instinctive faculty is left in as 

 much obscurity as ever. 



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