208 
INSTINCT. 
Chap. VII. 
But I could show that none of these characters of 
instinct are universal. A little dose, as Pierre Huber 
expresses it, of judgment or reason, often comes into 
play, even in animals very low in the scale of nature. 
Frederick Cuvier and several of the older metaphy¬ 
sicians have compared instinct with habit. This com¬ 
parison gives, I think, a remarkably accurate notion of 
the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is 
performed, but not of its origin. How unconsciously 
many habitual actions are performed, indeed not rarely 
in direct opposition to our conscious will! yet they may 
be modified by the will or reason. Habits easily become 
associated with other habits, and 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 completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth 
stage of construction, and put it into a hammock com¬ 
pleted up only to the third stage, the caterpillar simply 
re-performed the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of con¬ 
struction. If, however, 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, was already done for it, far from 
feeling the benefit of this, it was much embarrassed, and, 
in order to complete its hammock, seemed forced to 
start from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus 
tried to complete the already finished work. 
