Chapter 12

INSTINCTS OF NEUTER INSECTS

In this chapter I will consider, as briefly as possible, the strongest argument that I have been able to discover against the supposition that instinct is chiefly due to habit. I have said "the strongest argument;" I should have said, the only argument that struck me as offering on the face of it serious difficulties.

Turning, then, to Mr. Darwin's chapter on instinct ("Natural Selection," ed. 1876, p. 205), we find substantially much the same views as those taken at a later date by M. Ribot, and referred to in the preceding chapter. Mr. Darwin writes:-

"An action, which we ourselves require experience to enable us to perform, when performed by an animal, more especially a very young one, without experience, and when performed by many animals in the same way without their knowing for what purpose it is performed, is usually said to be instinctive."

The above should strictly be, "without their being conscious of their own knowledge concerning the purpose for which they act as they do;" and though some may say that the two phrases come to the same thing, I think there is an important difference, as what I propose distinguishes ignorance from over-familiarity, both which states are alike unself-conscious, though with widely different results.

"But I could show," continues Mr. Darwin, "that none of these characters are universal. A little dose of judgement or reason, as Pierre Huber expresses it, often comes into play even with animals low in the scale of nature.

"Frederick Cuvier and several of the older metaphysicians have compared instinct with habit."

I would go further and would say, that instinct, in the great majority of cases, is habit pure and simple, contracted originally by some one or more individuals; practised, probably, in a consciously intelligent manner during many successive lives, until the habit has acquired the highest perfection which the circumstances admitted; and, finally, so deeply impressed upon the memory as to survive that effacement of minor impressions which generally takes place in every fresh life-wave or generation.

I would say, that unless the identity of offspring with their parents be so far admitted that the children be allowed to remember the deeper impressions engraved on the minds of those who begot them, it is little less than trilling to talk, as so many writers do, about inherited habit, or the experience of the race, or, indeed, accumulated variations of instincts.

When an instinct is not habit, as resulting from memory pure and simple, it is habit modified by some treatment, generally in the youth or embryonic stages of the individual, which disturbs his memory, and drives him on to some unusual course, inasmuch as he cannot recognise and remember his usual one by reason of the change now made in it. Habits and