INSTINCT
_Instinct.--Can one oppose it to
intelligence?--Instinct in man.--Primordiality
of intelligence.--Instinct's conservative
rôle.--Modifying rôle of intelligence.--Intelligence
and consciousness.--Parity of animal and human
instinct.--Mechanical character of the instinctive
act.--Instinct modified by intelligence.--Habit
of work creates useless work.--Objections to the
identification of instinct and intelligence taken
from life of insects._
The question of instinct is perhaps the most nerve-racking there is.
Simple minds think they have solved it when they have set against
this word the other word: intelligence. That is merely the elementary
position of the problem. Not only does it explain nothing, but it
opposes all explanations. If instinct and intelligence are not
phenomena of the same order, reducible one to the other, the problem
is insoluble and we will never know what instinct is, nor what is
intelligence.
In the vulgar contrast one overhears the considerable naivete that
animals have instinct and man, intelligence. This error, pure rhetoric,
has prevented, up to the present, not the answer to the question
which still seems a long way off, but the scientific exposure of the
question itself. It includes but two formulæ: Either instinct is a
fructification of intelligence; or intelligence is an augmentation of
instinct. One must choose, and know that in choosing one makes, as the
case may be, either instinct or intelligence, the seed or flower of a
single plant: the sensibility.
One will first establish that for manifestations of instinct and for
those of intelligence, there is no essential difference between man and
animals. The life of all men, quite as well as that of all animals,
is based on instinct, and doubtless there is no animal who can not
give signs of spontaneity, that is to say, of intelligence. Instinct
seems anterior because in all animals except man the quantity and
especially the quality of instinctive facts greatly surpasses the value
and number of intellectual facts. This is so, but in admitting this
hierarchy, if one thereby explain with considerable difficulty, the
formation of intelligence in man and in the animals which show more
or less perceptible gleams of it, one also renounces by so doing, all
later attempts that might furnish some notions as to the formation of
instinct. If the bee makes his combs mechanically, if this act is as
necessary as the evaporation of warmed water, or the crystallization
of freezing water, it is useless to search any further: one is in the
presence of a fact which will never yield anything else.
If, on the contrary, one consider intelligence as anterior, the field
of investigation stretches out to infinity and instead of one problem
radically insoluble, one has a hundred thousand or more, as many
as there are animal species, and of these problems none is simple,
none absurd. This manner of looking at it, brings, I admit, grave
consequences. One must then look at matter as a simple allotropic form
of intelligence, or, if you prefer, consider intelligence and matter
as equivalents, and admit that intelligence is merely matter endowed
with sensibility, and that its power of extremely diversifying itself
finds impassable limits in the very forms which clothe it. Instinct
is the proof of these limits. When acts have become instinctive,
they have become invincible. A specie is a group of instincts whose
tyranny becomes, one day, deaf to all attempts at movement. Evolution
is limited by the resistance of what is, striving against what might
be. There comes a moment when a specie is a mass too heavy to be moved
by intelligence: then it remains in its place; this is death, but is
compensated by the steady arrival of other species; new forms assumed
by the inexhaustible Proteus.
One will add nothing, here, to this theory, save a few facts favourable
to it, and a handful of objections.
The old distinction between intelligence and instinct, although false
and superficial, may be adapted to the views just abbreviated. We will
attribute to instinct the series of acts which tend to conserve the
present condition of a specie; and to intelligence, those which tend to
modify that condition. Instinct will be slavery, subjection to custom;
intelligence will represent liberty, that is to say, choice, acts which
while being necessary, since they occur, have yet been determined
by an ensemble of causes anterior to those which govern instinct.
Intelligence will be the deep, the reserve, the spring which after long
digging emerges between the rocks. In everything that intelligence
suggests, the consciousness of the species makes a departure; what is
useful is incorporated in instinct, enlarging and diversifying it; what
is useless perishes--or perhaps flowers in extravagances, as it does
in man, in dancing and gardening birds, or the magpies attracted by a
jewel, larks by a mirror! One will then call instinct, the series of
useful aptitudes; intelligence, the series of aptitudes de luxe: but
what is useful, what useless? Who will dare brand a series of bird
notes or a feminine smile as lacking utility? There is neither utility
nor inutility unless there be also finality. But finality can not be
considered as an aim; it is nothing but a fact, and one which might be
other.
This utilization of old terms, if it were possible, could never be
the pretext for a new radical differentiation between instinct and
intelligence; one could only use it to define by contrast two states
whose manifestations present appreciable nuances. The great objection
to the essential identification of instinct and intelligence comes
from a habit of mind which spiritistic philosophy has for long imposed
upon us: instinct should be unconscious, intelligence, conscious.
But psychological analysis does not permit us rigorously to tie
intellectual activity to consciousness. Without consciousness, every
thing might happen, even in the most thoughtful man, exactly as it
does under the paternal eye of this consciousness. In M. Ribot's
interesting analogic comparison, consciousness is an interned candle
lighting a clock-face; it has the same influence on the movement of the
intelligence that this candle has on the clock. It is difficult to know
whether animals have consciousness, and it is perhaps useless, unless
at least, one admit that this candle, by its luminous or calorific
rays, does, as M. Fouillée teaches, affect the march of the mechanism.
In sum, consciousness also is a fact, and no fact dies without
consequences; there are neither first causes nor last causes. In any
case one will, since it is evident, cling to one statement that even if
consciousness is a possible reactive, intelligence can act without it:
the most conscious of men have phases of unconscious intellectuality;
long series of reasonable acts may be committed without their
reflection being visible in the mirror, without the candle being lit
before the clock. In brief, it does not seem as if nervous matter could
exist without intelligence or sensibility; but consciousness is an
extra. There is no need to take count of the old scholastic objection
to the identification of the intelligence and the instinct.
What is there serious in the other objection: that man, if he once had
instincts, has lost them?
The animal having the richest instincts ought also to have, or to have
had, the richest intelligence. And reciprocally: intellectual activity
supposes a greatly varied instinctive activity, either in the present
or in the future. If man have not instincts, he ought to be in the way
of making them. He has numerous instincts, and makes more every day:
a part of his consciousness is constantly crystallizing itself into
instinctive acts.
But if one consider the different instincts of animal species one
will scarcely find any which are not also human. The great human
activities are instinctive. Doubtless man may refrain from building
a palace, but he can not dispense with a cabin, a nest in a cave, or
in the fork of a tree, like the great apes, many mammals, birds, and
most insects. His food depends very little on choice, it must contain
certain indispensable elements: a necessity identical with that which
rules the animals, and even the plants whose roots reach down toward
the desired juice, and whose branches reach toward the light. Song,
dance, strife, and, for the group, war; human instincts are not unknown
to all animals. The taste for brilliant things, another human instinct
is frequent enough in birds; it is true that birds have not yet made
anything of it, and that man has evolved the sumptuary arts. There
remains love, but I think this supreme instinct is the consecrated
limit of the objections.
Useful acts habitually repeated may become invincible, like veritable
instinctive movements. A hunter[1] spending the winter in an isolated
cabin in Canada engaged an Indian woman to keep house for him. She
arrives in the evening, melts the snow, begins to wash up, shifts
everything, prevents his getting any sleep. He rages. Silence. As soon
as he is asleep, the woman mechanically begins to work again, and so
on, until the humble Indian gets the last word. Here, exactly as among
insects, one has the example of work which once begun must go on until
it is finished. The insect can not be interrupted; if it is interrupted
by external cause it starts work again not at the point where it
actually finds the work, but at the point where it, the insect, left
off. Thus, one entirely removed the nest which a chalicodome was
building on a shingle; the bee returns, finds nothing, since there is
nothing to find, but instead of recommencing the building, continues
it. There was nothing to be done but close the hole; the bee closes it,
that is to say she deposits the last mouthful of mortar on the ideal
dome of an absent nest: then with instinct satisfied, sure of having
assured her posterity, she retires, she goes to die. One can get the
same result with the pélopée, and with other builders. Processional
caterpillars are accustomed to make long trips in Indian file on the
branches of their native pine-tree, in search of food: if one place
them on the rim of a basin they will stupidly circulate for thirty
hours, without one of them having the idea of interrupting the circle
by going off at a tangent. They will die in their track, stuck fast
in obedience; when one falls another steps into his place, the ranks
close, that is all. Here are the extremities of instinct, and to our
great surprise they are almost the same in an Indian of the great lakes
and in a processional pine caterpillar.
But other cases of animal's instinct joining with free intelligence,
give examples of human sagacity. We have seen these same mason bees and
xylocopes and domestic bees profit eagerly by a nest ready made, by a
hole bored in wood, by artificial combs set ready to take their honey;
the osmies, who lay in the stalks of cut reeds, in which they arrange a
series of chambers, accommodated themselves under Fabre's guidance in
glass tubes which permitted the great observer to know them intimately.
Instinct is by turns as stupid as a machine and as intelligent as a
brain; these two extremes should correspond with very ancient and very
recent habits. It is certainly but a relatively short time since the
peasant's pruning-bill began preparing cut reeds for the osmie; before
that time she constructed her nest, as she still does, in empty snail
shells or in some natural cavity. They are very interesting these
osmies, extremely active solitary bees; one sees them having exhausted
their ovaries, but not their muscular force, building extra nests,
provisioning them with honey, without having laid a single egg in them;
they will even make and close them without honey, if they do not find
more flowers, thus showing a real craziness for work, an authentic
mania analogous to that which moves man to move pebbles, to smoke, to
drink rather than remain immobile.[2] If the osmie lived longer, she
might perhaps invent some game which, vain at the start, would end by
becoming both a need and a benefit to the whole species.
The theory which makes instinct a partial crystallization of
intelligence is extremely seductive: I dare say we will have to accept
it as true. Yet the contemplation of the insect world raises an
enormous objection. In the course of his wonderful memoirs Fabre has
formulated it ten times and with always fresh ingenuity. Here is the
insect, nearly always born adult, and after the death of her parents,
she has received from them neither direct education nor education by
example, as do the young of birds or mammals. A hen teaches her chick
to scratch for worms (it is true that she does not teach her ducklings
to dabble in puddles, and they are her despair, to our amusement), an
osmie can teach its young nothing. Yet now osmies do exactly what their
ancients have done. The insect opens its shell, brushes its antennæ,
performs its toilet, opens its wings, flies off for life, moves
without hesitation toward the pasture it needs, recognizes and flees
the enemies of its race, makes love, and finally constructs a nest
identical with the cradle from which it has emerged.[3]
One sees quite well that the acquisitions of the individual have
passed to the descendant, but how? How have they fixed themselves in
the nerves and blood during a few short days of life? Without any
apprenticeship the sphex paralyzes with three stabs the cricket which
is to feed its larvæ; if the cricket is killed and not paralyzed, the
larvæ will die, poisoned by the carrion; and if the paralysis is not
durable the cricket will come to, and destroy the sphex in the egg.
The manœuvre of this wasp and of many other killing hymenoptera has
this tiresome point for our reasoning, the act must be perfect, on
pain of death. Nevertheless it must be admitted that the sphex has
formed itself slowly, like all complex animals, and that its genius is
only the sum of intellectual acquisition slowly crystallized in the
specie.[4] As for the mechanism of this transformation of intelligence
into instinct, it has for motive the principle of utility; intelligent
acts which are useful for the preservation of the specie, are the only
ones which pass into instinct.
The science of these hymenoptera goes so far that it was ahead of
human science until yesterday. The insect attacks the nervous system;
it knows that the power of beginning a movement lies in the nervous
system and not in the limbs. If the nervous system is centralized
as in weevils, their enemy the cerceris gives only one dagger-stab;
if the movement depends on three ganglia, it gives three stabs; if
on nine ganglia, nine: thus does the shaggy ammophile when it needs
the caterpillar of the noctuelle, commonly called the gray worm, for
its larvæ; if a single sting in the cervical ganglion appears too
dangerous, the hunter limits himself to chewing it gently, in order to
induce the necessary degree of immobility. It is odd that the social
hymenoptera who know how to do so many difficult things, are ignorant
of this savant dagger-play. The bee stings at random, and so brutally
that she mutilates herself while often inflicting but an insignificant
wound on her adversary. Collective civilization has diminished the
individual genius.
[1] Vide Milton and Cheaddle, works already cited.
[2] Compare this with the valuable remarks of a gamekeeper, "One must
know the habits of animals, even their manias, for they have them, just
as we do." Figaro, 31, Aug. 1903.
[3] To my mind a slight unsoundness creeps into Chap. XVI, and here
both Fabre and Gourmont seem to me to go astray in considering the
insect as a separate creature, i. e. a creature cut off from its larva
or cocoon life. Surely the animal may be supposed to exist while in
its cocoon or larva, it may reasonably be supposed to pass that period
in reflection, preparing for precisely the acts of its desire (as for
example an intelligent young man might pass his years in a university
under professors, awaiting reasonable maturity to act or express his
objections). The larva has its months of quiet, precisely the necessary
pre-reflection for the two days' joy-ride of exterior manifestation,
amours, etc., its _contemplatio_, or what may be counted as analogous,
passing in its cell. The perfection and precision of its acts, being,
let us say, proportionate to the non-expressive period. Having spent
God knows how long in that possibly monotonous nest, it seems small
wonder that the insect should know the pattern by heart. Small wonder,
that is to say wonder not incommensurate with the general wonder of the
whole process.--E. P.
[4] Vide translator's postscript.