CHAPTER VIII

INSTINCT IN RELATION TO EDUCATION

Illustrations and Meaning of Instinct.—It is a matter of common observation that the lower animals perform many activities without any previous training on the part of the individual. These activities apparently are performed in a definite and uniform manner by all members of the species. Among typical illustrations we may cite the beaver building its dam when of a certain age, at a certain time of the year, and in a tolerably definite manner. The wild-goose migrates southward every year, and again in the spring its well-known honk may be heard as the flock seeks northern latitudes. Honey-bees build their. comb in an apparently invariable way from year to year; wasps, bumblebees, yellow-jackets, hornets, each have characteristic ways of constructing their nests and of gathering food. Birds of a given species build nests peculiar to themselves; dogs bury bones; hyenas are ever vigilant; cats play with captured mice; cattle, deer, and other animals, are afraid of red objects, etc. Many animals possess at birth, or almost immediately after, fully developed reactions for food-getting, and many exhibit very early attempts at self-protection from supposed foes. The foregoing activities are denominated as instinctive, and instinct may be defined in a preliminary way as follows: Instinct is an inborn tendency on the part of a given individual to act in a certain way under given stimuli without any foresight (necessarily) of the end to be accomplished, and without any previous education on the part of the individual.

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Marshall has given the following discriminating definition: "Instincts are forces within us which are organic, which appear 1 1 Instinct and Reason, p. 68.

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in us because we are organisms; which lead us to undertake, without forethought, actions of a very complex nature involving the movement of many parts of the body in relations which are more or less fixed, actions which, as the biologists say, are more or less thoroughly co-ordinated." He illumined the question still further by saying ' that, "Our instincts are springs of action which exist within the organism: our instinct actions occur because we are organisms, and because as organisms we inherit with our organic structure habits of action which lead to the attainment of certain ends which have significance for the organism; and we inherit these habits in general because our ancestors have become better adapted to their environment in consequence of the recurrence of these tendencies to act in certain specific ways upon the appearance of appropriate stimuli."

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Paulsen wrote of instinct: "The bee knows nothing of the brood of winter, and has no insight into the processes of nutrition; she is guided in all her activity, in her search for blossoms, the construction of her cells, the feeding of her offspring, by perceptions and traces of recollection, which are represented physiologically as nervous processes and dispositions." In other words, instincts are race habits, impulses, or tendencies toward activity in a given direction because of ancestral experience which has become so implanted in the race as to make its appearance in the individual a matter wholly reflex in character. The animal acts in a given way because its nervous mechanism functions in a predetermined manner.

Not Individual Education or Prevision. It is a popular notion that animals which exhibit instincts possess a clear foresight of the ends to be accomplished. "If the bee did not know that it must store up honey for a certain purpose, why should it be so diligent?" "Why should the beaver build its dam if not for definite self-protection and for protection of the expected young?" "Why should the ant store up food except for the long winter?" (It is not because the ant is lethargic all winter and 1 Instinct and Reason, p. 219. 2 Introduction to Philosophy, p. 114.

needs no food.) Apparently common sense has a case against us. But we could cite much evidence to show that the same animals perform instinctive actions when there is absolutely no possibility of such foresight. Among cases which show the utter irrationality of instinctive actions the following are typical: Well-fed domesticated dogs will bury bones, old shoes, etc., when no necessity exists for providing against future contingencies. They will do these things without having had a chance to imitate other dogs. As all farmers know, hens will often spend much valuable time in sitting for weeks upon a rude nest with a china egg and acting as important and cross as if the mother of a brood of a dozen. Hens hatched in incubators and without opportunity to imitate the act will perform it just as certainly and naturally as if such opportunity had existed. Now were the act rational and not reflex no hen would exhibit such stupidity. Its organism was simply keyed in a certain manner and it had to act in harmony with such demands.

Lloyd Morgan cites the case of the Yucca moth, which performs certain activities but once in a lifetime and those without any possibility of education. The insects emerge from their chrysalis-cases just when the flower opens, each for a single night. From the anthers of one of these flowers the female moth collects the golden pollen and in the pistil of another deposits her eggs among the ovules. The action seems to be the result of foreknowledge. This fertilization of the flower is as necessary as the fertilization of clover blossoms by bumblebees. "These marvellously adaptive instinctive activities of the Yucca moth are performed but once in her life, and that without instruction, with no opportunities of learning by imitation, and, apparently, without prevision of what will be the outcome of her behavior; for she has no experience of the subsequent fate of the eggs she lays, and cannot be credited with any knowledge of the effect of the pollen upon the ovules." 1 There are numberless cases of insects which pass through various metamorphoses, that perform perfectly and almost invariably certain activities, although 1 Habit and Instinct, p. 14.

none of a given generation have ever seen any of a preceding generation.

Habits, Reflexes, and Instincts Compared.-A habit is a resultant of the education of the individual, while instincts are the resultants of accumulated race experiences. These experiences are conserved and accumulated through natural and artificial selection and, according to eminent authorities like Romanes, through the transmission of acquired characters. This last view is as strongly denied by able men like Weismann. To produce a habit the individual must repeat a given series of actions a sufficient number of times to establish an easy pathway of discharge in the nervous system. Instinctive tendencies often have a marked influence in facilitating the formation of some habits.

Reflex action is non-voluntary and usually controlled by lower centres of the nervous system and not by the higher brain centres. I touch a hot stove. An impulse is sent toward the cortex, but when it reaches the spinal cord a current there generated innervates the muscle, causing me to withdraw my hand. In reflective, voluntary action the higher brain centres are brought into requisition. In a reflex the response to a stimulus is indefinite. The reaction may be for the good of the individual or it may not. It may or may not accomplish an apparently determined end, as in winking to avoid injury to the eye. The line of demarcation between the two is not sharply drawn. Undoubtedly many apparently purely individual reflexes have much of the instinctive element in them, and all instinctive actions are of the reflex type. Spencer has denominated instinct as compound reflex action. According to this interpretation the difference may be explained in the words of Lloyd Morgan: "Reflex acts are local responses due to specialized stimuli, while instinctive activities are matters of more general behavior and usually involving a larger measure of central (as opposed to merely local or ganglionic) co-ordination, and due to the more widely spread effects of stimuli in which both external and internal factors cooperate."

"It would seem, therefore, that, whereas a reflex act—such, for example, as the winking of the eye when an object is seen to approach it rapidly-is a restricted and localized response, involving a particular organ or a definite group of muscles, and is initiated by a more or less specialized external stimulus; an instinctive activity is a response of the organism as a whole, and involves the co-operation of several organs and many groups of muscles. Initiated by an external stimulus or a group of stimuli, it is, at any rate in many cases, determined also in greater degree than reflex action by an internal factor which causes uneasiness or distress, more or less marked, if it do not find its normal instinctive satisfaction." 1

Instincts not Invariable. It has been a popular notion that instincts are fixed and invariable in a given species in all its individuals and through successive generations. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of coming ready-made once for all, we find that they are products of evolutionary forces. They come into existence, are subject to modifications, and may atrophy or decay, leaving only vestigial evidence or none whatsoever of their existence.

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Marshall says that: "The definiteness and the invariability of the co-ordination of these actions are relative definiteness and relative invariability only. This became evident when it was noted that the efficiency of many instincts even of the lower types depends upon the trend of the activities they induce even where there is a certain degree of variation in circumstances of stimulation, or in the stimuli themselves, and consequently in the reactions to these stimuli. The reader will remember that we illustrated this fact by recalling to his mind the variations of action and co-ordination noted in the young chick in its instinctive search for food supply; the general end being reached through slightly varying co-ordinations of action.

"It will also be remembered that as we studied instincts of a higher type we found less definiteness and invariability of reaction, and a marked preponderance of cases where the 1 Habit and Instinct, p. 7. 2 Instinct and Reason, p. 219.