270 
BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
quences of your opinion, I very much fear it, will be 
fatal to your faith. 
We did talk over the matter; and the following is a 
summary of the conclusion we arrived at:— 
The customary mode of ascribing the actions of animals 
to the operation of a faculty called instinct, is not only 
unsatisfactory but false. The word is used as a loophole 
from a supposed difficulty; namely, that animals think. 
Admitting that we know little or nothing of either 
instinct or intelligence in their essence, we do know that 
in their manifestation they are widely different. Let us 
take the best known, and most wonderful, perhaps, of 
all the recorded examples of instinct—the work of the 
honey-bee. If we propose to call this intelligence, we 
become responsible to prove that the bee is acquainted 
with the laws of geometry, as applied to the economising 
of the bulk and strength of materials. But the work of 
the bee differs from the work of an intelligent creature 
in its constant uniformity : when uniformity is departed 
from, there may be some reason to conclude that intelli¬ 
gence is the moving power, and in the bee we occasion¬ 
ally witness exhibitions of intelligence, but in its whole 
life it is pre-eminently a creature of instinct. What, 
then, is instinct ? It is a blind impulse, operating by 
means it does not understand, to attain ends of which it 
is probably ignorant. This definition may be unsatis¬ 
factory, but it w r ill suffice to indicate the recognised 
distinctions between instinct and intelligence; the latter 
has an object in view, and it reasons upon data, in order 
to ascertain the best means to attain to the fulfiment of 
its desires. Among the best known examples of instinct. 
