INSTINCT.
=Its Definition.=--_Instinct is usually defined as the faculty of acting
in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends,
and without previous education in the performance._ Instincts are the
functional correlatives of structure. With the presence of a certain
organ goes, one may say, almost always a native aptitude for its use.
The actions we call instinctive all conform to the general reflex type;
they are called forth by determinate sensory stimuli in contact with the
animal's body, or at a distance in his environment. The cat runs after
the mouse, runs or shows fight before the dog, avoids falling from walls
and trees, shuns fire and water, etc., not because he has any notion
either of life or of death, or of self, or of preservation. He has
probably attained to no one of these conceptions in such a way as to
react definitely upon it. He acts in each case separately, and simply
because he cannot help it; being so framed that when that particular
running thing called a mouse appears in his field of vision he _must_
pursue; that when that particular barking and obstreperous thing called
a dog appears there he _must_ retire, if at a distance, and scratch if
close by; that he _must_ withdraw his feet from water and his face from
flame, etc. His nervous system is to a great extent a preorganized
bundle of such reactions--they are as fatal as sneezing, and as exactly
correlated to their special excitants as it is to its own. Although the
naturalist may, for his own convenience, class these reactions under
general heads, he must not forget that in the animal it is a particular
sensation or perception or image which calls them forth.
At first this view astounds us by the enormous number of special
adjustments it supposes animals to possess ready-made in anticipation of
the outer things among which they are to dwell. _Can_ mutual dependence
be so intricate and go so far? Is each thing born fitted to particular
other things, and to them exclusively, as locks are fitted to their
keys? Undoubtedly this must be believed to be so. Each nook and cranny
of creation, down to our very skin and entrails, has its living
inhabitants, with organs suited to the place, to devour and digest the
food it harbors and to meet the dangers it conceals; and the minuteness
of adaptation thus shown in the way of _structure_ knows no bounds. Even
so are there no bounds to the minuteness of adaptation in the way of
_conduct_ which the several inhabitants display.
The older writings on instinct are ineffectual wastes of words, because
their authors never came down to this definite and simple point of view,
but smothered everything in vague wonder at the clairvoyant and
prophetic power of the animals--so superior to anything in man--and at
the beneficence of God in endowing them with such a gift. But God's
beneficence endows them, first of all, with a nervous system; and,
turning our attention to this, makes instinct immediately appear neither
more nor less wonderful than all the other facts of life.
=Every instinct is an impulse.= Whether we shall call such impulses as
blushing, sneezing, coughing, smiling, or dodging, or keeping time to
music, instincts or not, is a mere matter of terminology. The process is
the same throughout. In his delightfully fresh and interesting work,
'Der Thierische Wille,' Herr G. H. Schneider subdivides impulses
(_Triebe_) into sensation-impulses, perception-impulses, and
idea-impulses. To crouch from cold is a sensation-impulse; to turn and
follow, if we see people running one way, is a perception-impulse; to
cast about for cover, if it begins to blow and rain, is an
imagination-impulse. A single complex instinctive action may involve
successively the awakening of impulses of all three classes. Thus a
hungry lion starts to _seek_ prey by the awakening in him of imagination
coupled with desire; he begins to _stalk_ it when, on eye, ear, or
nostril, he gets an impression of its presence at a certain distance; he
_springs_ upon it, either when the booty takes alarm and flees, or when
the distance is sufficiently reduced; he proceeds to _tear_ and _devour_
it the moment he gets a sensation of its contact with his claws and
fangs. Seeking, stalking, springing, and devouring are just so many
different kinds of muscular contraction, and neither kind is called
forth by the stimulus appropriate to the other.
_Now, why do the various animals do what seem to us such strange
things_, in the presence of such outlandish stimuli? Why does the hen,
for example, submit herself to the tedium of incubating such a fearfully
uninteresting set of objects as a nestful of eggs, unless she have some
sort of a prophetic inkling of the result? The only answer is _ad
hominem_. We can only interpret the instincts of brutes by what we know
of instincts in ourselves. Why do men always lie down, when they can, on
soft beds rather than on hard floors? Why do they sit round the stove on
a cold day? Why, in a room, do they place themselves, ninety-nine times
out of a hundred, with their faces towards its middle rather than to the
wall? Why do they prefer saddle of mutton and champagne to hard-tack and
ditch-water? Why does the maiden interest the youth so that everything
about her seems more important and significant than anything else in the
world? Nothing more can be said than that these are human ways, and that
every creature _likes_ its own ways, and takes to the following them as
a matter of course. Science may come and consider these ways, and find
that most of them are useful. But it is not for the sake of their
utility that they are followed, but because at the moment of following
them we feel that that is the only appropriate and natural thing to do.
Not one man in a billion, when taking his dinner, ever thinks of
utility. He eats because the food tastes good and makes him want more.
If you ask him _why_ he should want to eat more of what tastes like
that, instead of revering you as a philosopher he will probably laugh at
you for a fool. The connection between the savory sensation and the act
it awakens is for him absolute and _selbstverständlich_, an '_a priori_
synthesis' of the most perfect sort, needing no proof but its own
evidence. It takes, in short, what Berkeley calls a mind debauched by
learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far
as to ask for the _why_ of any instinctive human act. To the
metaphysician alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when
pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk
to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so
upside-down? The common man can only say, "_Of course_ we smile, _of
course_ our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, _of course_ we
love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so
palpably and flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved!"
And so, probably, does each animal feel about the particular things it
tends to do in presence of particular objects. They, too, are _a priori_
syntheses. To the lion it is the lioness which is made to be loved; to
the bear, the she-bear. To the broody hen the notion would probably seem
monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful
of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious and
never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her.
Thus we may be sure that, however mysterious some animals' instincts may
appear to us, our instincts will appear no less mysterious to them. And
we may conclude that, to the animal which obeys it, every impulse and
every step of every instinct shines with its own sufficient light, and
seems at the moment the only eternally right and proper thing to do. It
is done for its own sake exclusively. What voluptuous thrill may not
shake a fly, when she at last discovers the one particular leaf, or
carrion, or bit of dung, that out of all the world can stimulate her
ovipositor to its discharge? Does not the discharge then seem to her the
only fitting thing? And need she care or know anything about the future
maggot and its food?
=Instincts are not always blind or invariable.= Nothing is commoner than
the remark that man differs from lower creatures by the almost total
absence of instincts, and the assumption of their work in him by
'reason.' A fruitless discussion might be waged on this point by two
theorizers who were careful not to define their terms. We must of course
avoid a quarrel about words, and the facts of the case are really
tolerably plain. Man has a far greater variety of _impulses_ than any
lower animal; and any one of these impulses, taken in itself, is as
'blind' as the lowest instinct can be; but, owing to man's memory, power
of reflection, and power of inference, they come each one to be felt by
him, after he has once yielded to them and experienced their results, in
connection with a _foresight_ of those results. In this condition an
impulse acted out may be said to be acted out, in part at least, _for
the sake_ of its results. It is obvious that _every instinctive act, in
an animal with memory, must cease to be 'blind' after being once
repeated_, and must be accompanied with foresight of its 'end' just so
far as that end may have fallen under the animal's cognizance. An insect
that lays her eggs in a place where she never sees them hatched must
always do so 'blindly'; but a hen who has already hatched a brood can
hardly be assumed to sit with perfect 'blindness' on her second nest.
Some expectation of consequences must in every case like this be
aroused; and this expectation, according as it is that of something
desired or of something disliked, must necessarily either re-enforce or
inhibit the mere impulse. The hen's idea of the chickens would probably
encourage her to sit; a rat's memory, on the other hand, of a former
escape from a trap would neutralize his impulse to take bait from
anything that reminded him of that trap. If a boy sees a fat
hopping-toad, he probably has incontinently an impulse (especially if
with other boys) to smash the creature with a stone, which impulse we
may suppose him blindly to obey. But something in the expression of the
dying toad's clasped hands suggests the meanness of the act, or reminds
him of sayings he has heard about the sufferings of animals being like
his own; so that, when next he is tempted by a toad, an idea arises
which, far from spurring him again to the torment, prompts kindly
actions, and may even make him the toad's champion against less
reflecting boys.
It is plain, then, that, _no matter how well endowed an animal may
originally be in the way of instincts, his resultant actions will be
much modified if the instincts combine with experience_, if in addition
to impulses he have memories, associations, inferences, and
expectations, on any considerable scale. An object O, on which he has an
instinctive impulse to react in the manner A, would _directly_ provoke
him to that reaction. But O has meantime become for him a _sign_ of the
nearness of P, on which he has an equally strong impulse to react in the
manner B, quite unlike A. So that when he meets O, the immediate impulse
A and the remote impulse B struggle in his breast for the mastery. The
fatality and uniformity said to be characteristic of instinctive actions
will be so little manifest that one might be tempted to deny to him
altogether the possession of any instinct about the object O. Yet how
false this judgment would be! The instinct about O is there; only by the
complication of the associative machinery it has come into conflict with
another instinct about P.
Here we immediately reap the good fruits of our simple physiological
conception of what an instinct is. If it be a mere excito-motor impulse,
due to the preëxistence of a certain 'reflex arc' in the nerve-centres
of the creature, of course it must follow the law of all such reflex
arcs. One liability of such arcs is to have their activity 'inhibited'
by other processes going on at the same time. It makes no difference
whether the arc be organized at birth, or ripen spontaneously later, or
be due to acquired habit; it must take its chances with all the other
arcs, and sometimes succeed, and sometimes fail, in drafting off the
currents through itself. The mystical view of an instinct would make it
invariable. The physiological view would require it to show occasional
irregularities in any animal in whom the number of separate instincts,
and the possible entrance of the same stimulus into several of them,
were great. And such irregularities are what every superior animal's
instincts do show in abundance.
Wherever the mind is elevated enough to discriminate; wherever several
distinct sensory elements must combine to discharge the reflex arc;
wherever, instead of plumping into action instantly at the first rough
intimation of what _sort_ of a thing is there, the agent waits to see
which _one_ of its kind it is and what the _circumstances_ are of its
appearance; wherever different individuals and different circumstances
can impel him in different ways; wherever these are the conditions--we
have a masking of the elementary constitution of the instinctive life.
The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is the
history of our taking advantage of the way in which they judge of
everything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill them.
Nature, in them, has left matters in this rough way, and made them act
_always_ in the manner which would be _oftenest_ right. There are more
worms unattached to hooks than impaled upon them; therefore, on the
whole, says Nature to her fishy children, bite at _every_ worm and take
your chances. But as her children get higher, and their lives more
precious, she reduces the risks. Since what seems to be the same object
may be now a genuine food and now a bait; since in gregarious species
each individual may prove to be either the friend or the rival,
according to the circumstances, of another; since any entirely unknown
object may be fraught with weal or woe. _Nature implants contrary
impulses to act on many classes of things_, and leaves it to slight
alterations in the conditions of the individual case to decide which
impulse shall carry the day. Thus, greediness and suspicion, curiosity
and timidity, coyness and desire, bashfulness and vanity, sociability
and pugnacity, seem to shoot over into each other as quickly, and to
remain in as unstable an equilibrium, in the higher birds and mammals as
in man. All are impulses, congenital, blind at first, and productive of
motor reactions of a rigorously determinate sort. _Each one of them then
is an instinct_, as instincts are commonly defined. _But they contradict
each other_--'experience' in each particular opportunity of application
usually deciding the issue. _The animal that exhibits them loses the
'instinctive' demeanor_ and appears to lead a life of hesitation and
choice, an intellectual life; _not, however, because he has no
instincts--rather because he has so many that they block each other's
path_.
Thus we may confidently say that however uncertain man's reactions upon
his environment may sometimes seem in comparison with those of lower
mammals, the uncertainty is probably not due to their possession of any
principles of action which he lacks. _On the contrary, man possesses all
the impulses that they have, and a great many more besides._ In other
words, there is no material antagonism between instinct and reason.
Reason, _per se_, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can
neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may, however,
make an _inference which will excite the imagination so as to let loose_
the impulse the other way; and thus, though the animal richest in reason
is also the animal richest in instinctive impulses too, he never seems
the fatal automaton which a _merely_ instinctive animal must be.
=Two Principles of Non-uniformity.=--Instincts may be masked in the mature
animal's life by two other causes. These are:
_a._ The _inhibition of instincts by habits_; and
_b._ The _transitoriness of instincts_.
_a._ The law of =inhibition of instincts by habits= is this: _When objects
of a certain class elicit from an animal a certain sort of reaction, it
often happens that the animal becomes partial to the first specimen of
the class on which it has reacted, and will not afterward react on any
other specimen._
The selection of a particular hole to live in, of a particular mate, of
a particular feeding-ground, a particular variety of diet, a particular
anything, in short, out of a possible multitude, is a very wide-spread
tendency among animals, even those low down in the scale. The limpet
will return to the same sticking-place in its rock, and the lobster to
its favorite nook on the sea-bottom. The rabbit will deposit its dung in
the same corner; the bird makes its nest on the same bough. But each of
these preferences carries with it an insensibility to _other_
opportunities and occasions--an insensibility which can only be
described physiologically as an inhibition of new impulses by the habit
of old ones already formed. The possession of homes and wives of our own
makes us strangely insensible to the charms of those of other people.
Few of us are adventurous in the matter of food; in fact, most of us
think there is something disgusting in a bill of fare to which we are
unused. Strangers, we are apt to think, cannot be worth knowing,
especially if they come from distant cities, etc. The original impulse
which got us homes, wives, dietaries, and friends at all, seems to
exhaust itself in its first achievements and to leave no surplus energy
for reacting on new cases. And so it comes about that, witnessing this
torpor, an observer of mankind might say that no _instinctive_
propensity toward certain objects existed at all. It existed, but it
existed _miscellaneously_, or as an instinct pure and simple, only
before habit was formed. A habit, once grafted on an instinctive
tendency, restricts the range of the tendency itself, and keeps us from
reacting on any but the habitual object, although other objects might
just as well have been chosen had they been the first-comers.
Another sort of arrest of instinct by habit is where the same class of
objects awakens contrary instinctive impulses. Here the impulse first
followed toward a given individual of the class is apt to keep him from
ever awakening the opposite impulse in us. In fact, the whole class may
be protected by this individual specimen from the application to it of
the other impulse. Animals, for example, awaken in a child the opposite
impulses of fearing and fondling. But if a child, in his first attempts
to pat a dog, gets snapped at or bitten, so that the impulse of fear is
strongly aroused, it may be that for years to come no dog will excite in
him the impulse to fondle again. On the other hand, the greatest natural
enemies, if carefully introduced to each other when young and guided at
the outset by superior authority, settle down into those 'happy
families' of friends which we see in our menageries. Young animals,
immediately after birth, have no instinct of fear, but show their
dependence by allowing themselves to be freely handled. Later, however,
they grow 'wild' and, if left to themselves, will not let man approach
them. I am told by farmers in the Adirondack wilderness that it is a
very serious matter if a cow wanders off and calves in the woods and is
not found for a week or more. The calf, by that time, is as wild and
almost as fleet as a deer, and hard to capture without violence. But
calves rarely show any wildness to the men who have been in contact with
them during the first days of their life, when the instinct to attach
themselves is uppermost, nor do they dread strangers as they would if
brought up wild.
Chickens give a curious illustration of the same law. Mr. Spalding's
wonderful article on instinct shall supply us with the facts. These
little creatures show opposite instincts of attachment and fear, either
of which may be aroused by the same object, man. If a chick is born in
the absence of the hen, it "will follow any moving object. And when
guided by sight alone, they seem to have no more disposition to follow a
hen than to follow a duck or a human being. Unreflecting lookers-on,
when they saw chickens a day old running after me," says Mr. Spalding,
"and older ones following me for miles, and answering to my whistle,
imagined that I must have some occult power over the creatures: whereas
I had simply allowed them to follow me from the first. There is the
instinct to follow; and the ear, prior to experience, attaches them to
the right object."[49]
But if a man presents himself for the first time when the instinct of
_fear_ is strong, the phenomena are altogether reversed. Mr. Spalding
kept three chickens hooded until they were nearly four days old, and
thus describes their behavior:
"Each of them, on being unhooded, evinced the greatest terror to me,
dashing off in the opposite direction whenever I sought to approach it.
The table on which they were unhooded stood before a window, and each in
its turn beat against the window like a wild bird. One of them darted
behind some books, and, squeezing itself into a corner, remained
cowering for a length of time. We might guess at the meaning of this
strange and exceptional wildness; but the odd fact is enough for my
present purpose. Whatever might have been the meaning of this marked
change in their mental constitution--had they been unhooded on the
previous day they would have run to me instead of from me--it could not
have been the effect of experience; it must have resulted wholly from
changes in their own organizations."[50]
Their case was precisely analogous to that of the Adirondack calves. The
two opposite instincts relative to the same object ripen in succession.
If the first one engenders a habit, that habit will inhibit the
application of the second instinct to that object. All animals are tame
during the earliest phase of their infancy. Habits formed then limit the
effects of whatever instincts of wildness may later be evolved.
_b._ This leads us to the =law of transitoriness=, which is this: _Many
instincts ripen at a certain age and then fade away_. A consequence of
this law is that if, during the time of such an instinct's vivacity,
objects adequate to arouse it are met with, a _habit_ of acting on them
is formed, which remains when the original instinct has passed away; but
that if no such objects are met with, then no habit will be formed; and,
later on in life, when the animal meets the objects, he will altogether
fail to react, as at the earlier epoch he would instinctively have done.
No doubt such a law is restricted. Some instincts are far less transient
than others--those connected with feeding and 'self-preservation' may
hardly be transient at all,--and some, after fading out for a time,
recur as strong as ever; e.g., the instincts of pairing and rearing
young. The law, however, though not absolute, is certainly very
widespread, and a few examples will illustrate just what it means.
In the chickens and calves above mentioned it is obvious that the
instinct to follow and become attached fades out after a few days, and
that the instinct of flight then take its place, the conduct of the
creature toward man being decided by the formation or non-formation of a
certain habit during those days. The transiency of the chicken's
instinct to follow is also proved by its conduct toward the hen. Mr.
Spalding kept some chickens shut up till they were comparatively old,
and, speaking of these, he says:
"A chicken that has not heard the call of the mother until eight or ten
days old then hears it as if it heard it not. I regret to find that on
this point my notes are not so full as I could wish, or as they might
have been. There is, however, an account of one chicken that could not
be returned to the mother when ten days old. The hen followed it, and
tried to entice it in every way; still, it continually left her and ran
to the house or to any person of whom it caught sight. This it persisted
in doing, though beaten back with a small branch dozens of times, and,
indeed, cruelly maltreated. It was also placed under the mother at
night, but it again left her in the morning."
The instinct of sucking is ripe in all mammals at birth, and leads to
that habit of taking the breast which, in the human infant, may be
prolonged by daily exercise long beyond its usual term of a year or a
year and a half. But the instinct itself is transient, in the sense that
if, for any reason, the child be fed by spoon during the first few days
of its life and not put to the breast, it may be no easy matter after
that to make it suck at all. So of calves. If their mother die, or be
dry, or refuse to let them suck for a day or two, so that they are fed
by hand, it becomes hard to get them to suck at all when a new nurse is
provided. The ease with which sucking creatures are weaned, by simply
breaking the habit and giving them food in a new way, shows that the
instinct, purely as such, must be entirely extinct.
Assuredly the simple fact that instincts are transient, and that the
effect of later ones may be altered by the habits which earlier ones
have left behind, is a far more philosophical explanation than the
notion of an instinctive constitution vaguely 'deranged' or 'thrown out
of gear.'
I have observed a Scotch terrier, born on the floor of a stable in
December, and transferred six weeks later to a carpeted house, make,
when he was less than four months old, a very elaborate pretence of
burying things, such as gloves, etc., with which he had played till he
was tired. He scratched the carpet with his forefeet, dropped the object
from his mouth upon the spot, then scratched all about it, and finally
went away and let it lie. Of course, the act was entirely useless. I saw
him perform it at that age some four or five times, and never again in
his life. The conditions were not present to fix a habit which should
last when the prompting instinct died away. But suppose meat instead of
a glove, earth instead of a carpet, hunger-pangs instead of a fresh
supper a few hours later, and it is easy to see how this dog might have
got into a habit of burying superfluous food, which might have lasted
all his life. Who can swear that the strictly instinctive part of the
food-burying propensity in the wild _Canidæ_ may not be as short-lived
as it was in this terrier?
Leaving lower animals aside, and turning to human instincts, we see the
law of transiency corroborated on the widest scale by the alternation of
different interests and passions as human life goes on. With the child,
life is all play and fairy-tales and learning the external properties of
'things'; with the youth, it is bodily exercises of a more systematic
sort, novels of the real world, boon-fellowship and song, friendship and
love, nature, travel and adventure, science and philosophy; with the
man, ambition and policy, acquisitiveness, responsibility to others, and
the selfish zest of the battle of life. If a boy grows up alone at the
age of games and sports, and learns neither to play ball, nor row, nor
sail, nor ride, nor skate, nor fish, nor shoot, probably he will be
sedentary to the end of his days; and, though the best of opportunities
be afforded him for learning these things later, it is a hundred to one
but he will pass them by and shrink back from the effort of taking those
necessary first steps the prospect of which, at an earlier age, would
have filled him with eager delight. The sexual passion expires after a
protracted reign; but it is well known that its peculiar manifestations
in a given individual depend almost entirely on the habits he may form
during the early period of its activity. Exposure to bad company then
makes him a loose liver all his days; chastity kept at first makes the
same easy later on. In all pedagogy the great thing is to strike the
iron while hot, and to seize the wave of the pupil's interest in each
successive subject before its ebb has come, so that knowledge may be
got and a habit of skill acquired--a headway of interest, in short,
secured, on which afterward the individual may float. There is a happy
moment for fixing skill in drawing, for making boys collectors in
natural history, and presently dissectors and botanists; then for
initiating them into the harmonies of mechanics and the wonders of
physical and chemical law. Later, introspective psychology and the
metaphysical and religious mysteries take their turn; and, last of all,
the drama of human affairs and worldly wisdom in the widest sense of the
term. In each of us a saturation-point is soon reached in all these
things; the impetus of our purely intellectual zeal expires, and unless
the topic be one associated with some urgent personal need that keeps
our wits constantly whetted about it, we settle into an equilibrium, and
live on what we learned when our interest was fresh and instinctive,
without adding to the store. Outside of their own business, the ideas
gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas
they shall have in their lives. They _cannot_ get anything new.
Disinterested curiosity is past, the mental grooves and channels set,
the power of assimilation gone. If by chance we ever do learn anything
about some entirely new topic, we are afflicted with a strange sense of
insecurity, and we fear to advance a resolute opinion. But with things
learned in the plastic days of instinctive curiosity we never lose
entirely our sense of being at home. There remains a kinship, a
sentiment of intimate acquaintance, which, even when we know we have
failed to keep abreast of the subject, flatters us with a sense of power
over it, and makes us feel not altogether out of the pale.
Whatever individual exceptions to this might be cited are of the sort
that 'prove the rule.'
To detect the moment of the instinctive readiness for the subject is,
then, the first duty of every educator. As for the pupils, it would
probably lead to a more earnest temper on the part of college students
if they had less belief in their unlimited future intellectual
potentialities, and could be brought to realize that whatever physics
and political economy and philosophy they are now acquiring are, for
better or worse, the physics and political economy and philosophy that
will have to serve them to the end.
=Enumeration of Instincts in Man.=--Professor Preyer, in his careful
little work, 'Die Seele des Kindes,' says "instinctive acts are in man
few in number, and, apart from those connected with the sexual passion,
difficult to recognize after early youth is past." And he adds, "so much
the more attention should we pay to the instinctive movements of
new-born babies, sucklings, and small children." That instinctive acts
should be easiest _recognized_ in childhood would be a very natural
effect of our principles of transitoriness, and of the restrictive
influence of habits once acquired; but they are far indeed from being
'few in number' in man. Professor Preyer divides the movements of
infants into _impulsive_, _reflex_, and _instinctive_. By impulsive
movements he means _random_ movements of limbs, body, and voice, with no
aim, and before perception is aroused. Among the first reflex movements
are crying on contact with the air, _sneezing, snuffling, snoring,
coughing, sighing, sobbing, gagging, vomiting, hiccuping, starting,
moving the limbs when touched, and sucking_. To these may now be added
_hanging by the hands_ (see _Nineteenth Century_, Nov. 1891). Later on
come _biting_, _clasping objects_, and _carrying them to the mouth_,
_sitting up_, _standing_, _creeping_, and _walking_. It is probable that
the centres for executing these three latter acts ripen spontaneously,
just as those for flight have been proved to do in birds, and that the
appearance of _learning_ to stand and walk, by trial and failure, is due
to the exercise beginning in most children before the centres are ripe.
Children vary enormously in the rate and manner in which they learn to
walk. With the first impulses to _imitation_, those to significant
_vocalization_ are born. _Emulation_ rapidly ensues, with _pugnacity_ in
its train. _Fear_ of definite objects comes in early, _sympathy_ much
later, though on the instinct (or emotion?--see p. 373) of sympathy so
much in human life depends. _Shyness_ and _sociability_, _play_,
_curiosity_, _acquisitiveness_, all begin very early in life. The
_hunting instinct_, _modesty_, _love_, the _parental instinct_, etc.,
come later. By the age of 15 or 16 the whole array of human instincts is
complete. It will be observed that _no other mammal, not even the
monkey, shows so large a list_. In a perfectly-rounded development every
one of these instincts would start a habit toward certain objects and
inhibit a habit towards certain others. Usually this is the case; but,
in the one-sided development of civilized life, it happens that the
timely age goes by in a sort of starvation of objects, and the
individual then grows up with gaps in his psychic constitution which
future experiences can never fill. Compare the accomplished gentleman
with the poor artisan or tradesman of a city: during the adolescence of
the former, objects appropriate to his growing interests, bodily and
mental, were offered as fast as the interests awoke, and, as a
consequence, he is armed and equipped at every angle to meet the world.
Sport came to the rescue and completed his education where real things
were lacking. He has tasted of the essence of every side of human life,
being sailor, hunter, athlete, scholar, fighter, talker, dandy, man of
affairs, etc., all in one. Over the city poor boy's youth no such golden
opportunities were hung, and in his manhood no desires for most of them
exist. Fortunate it is for him if gaps are the only anomalies his
instinctive life presents; perversions are too often the fruit of his
unnatural bringing-up.
=Description of Fear.=--In order to treat at least one instinct at greater
length, I will take the instance of _fear_.
Fear is a reaction aroused by the same objects that arouse ferocity. The
antagonism of the two is an interesting study in instinctive dynamics.
We both fear, and wish to kill, anything that may kill us; and the
question which of the two impulses we shall follow is usually decided
by some one of those collateral circumstances of the particular case, to
be moved by which is the mark of superior mental natures. Of course this
introduces uncertainty into the reaction; but it is an uncertainty found
in the higher brutes as well as in men, and ought not to be taken as
proof that we are less instinctive than they. Fear has bodily
expressions of an extremely energetic kind, and stands, beside lust and
anger, as one of the three most exciting emotions of which our nature is
susceptible. The progress from brute to man is characterized by nothing
so much as by the decrease in frequency of proper occasions for fear. In
civilized life, in particular, it has at last become possible for large
numbers of people to pass from the cradle to the grave without ever
having had a pang of genuine fear. Many of us need an attack of mental
disease to teach us the meaning of the word. Hence the possibility of so
much blindly optimistic philosophy and religion. The atrocities of life
become 'like a tale of little meaning though the words are strong'; we
doubt if anything like _us_ ever really was within the tiger's jaws, and
conclude that the horrors we hear of are but a sort of painted tapestry
for the chambers in which we lie so comfortably at peace with ourselves
and with the world.
Be this as it may, fear is a genuine instinct, and one of the earliest
shown by the human child. _Noises_ seem especially to call it forth.
Most noises from the outer world, to a child bred in the house, have no
exact significance. They are simply startling. To quote a good observer,
M. Perez:
"Children between three and ten months are less often alarmed by visual
than by auditory impressions. In cats, from the fifteenth day, the
contrary is the case. A child, three and a half months old, in the midst
of the turmoil of a conflagration, in presence of the devouring flames
and ruined walls, showed neither astonishment nor fear, but smiled at
the woman who was taking care of him, while his parents were busy. The
noise, however, of the trumpet of the firemen, who were approaching, and
that of the wheels of the engine, made him start and cry. At this age I
have never yet seen an infant startled at a flash of lightning, even
when intense; but I have seen many of them alarmed at the voice of the
thunder.... Thus fear comes rather by the ears than by the eyes, to the
child without experience."[51]
The effect of noise in heightening any terror we may feel in adult years
is very marked. The _howling_ of the storm, whether on sea or land, is a
principal cause of our anxiety when exposed to it. The writer has been
interested in noticing in his own person, while lying in bed, and kept
awake by the wind outside, how invariably each loud gust of it arrested
momentarily his heart. A dog attacking us is much more dreadful by
reason of the noises he makes.
_Strange men_, and _strange animals_, either large or small, excite
fear, but especially men or animals advancing toward us in a threatening
way. This is entirely instinctive and antecedent to experience. Some
children will cry with terror at their very first sight of a cat or dog,
and it will often be impossible for weeks to make them touch it. Others
will wish to fondle it almost immediately. Certain kinds of 'vermin,'
especially spiders and snakes, seem to excite a fear unusually difficult
to overcome. It is impossible to say how much of this difference is
instinctive and how much the result of stories heard about these
creatures. That the fear of 'vermin' ripens gradually seemed to me to be
proved in a child of my own to whom I gave a live frog once, at the age
of six to eight months, and again when he was a year and a half old. The
first time, he seized it promptly, and holding it in spite of its
struggling, at last got its head into his mouth. He then let it crawl
up his breast, and get upon his face, without showing alarm. But the
second time, although he had seen no frog and heard no story about a
frog betweenwhiles, it was almost impossible to induce him to touch it.
Another child, a year old, eagerly took some very large spiders into his
hand. At present he is afraid, but has been exposed meanwhile to the
teachings of the nursery. One of my children from her birth upwards saw
daily the pet pug-dog of the house, and never betrayed the slightest
fear until she was (if I recollect rightly) about eight months old. Then
the instinct suddenly seemed to develop, and with such intensity that
familiarity had no mitigating effect. She screamed whenever the dog
entered the room, and for many months remained afraid to touch him. It
is needless to say that no change in the pug's unfailingly friendly
conduct had anything to do with this change of feeling in the child. Two
of my children were afraid, when babies, of _fur_: Richet reports a
similar observation.
Preyer tells of a young child screaming with fear on being carried near
to the _sea_. The great source of terror to infancy is solitude. The
teleology of this is obvious, as is also that of the infant's expression
of dismay--the never-failing cry--on waking up and finding himself
alone.
_Black things_, and especially _dark places_, holes, caverns, etc.,
arouse a peculiarly gruesome fear. This fear, as well as that of
solitude, of being 'lost,' are explained after a fashion by ancestral
experience. Says Schneider:
"It is a fact that men, especially in childhood, fear to go into a dark
cavern or a gloomy wood. This feeling of fear arises, to be sure, partly
from the fact that we easily suspect that dangerous beasts may lurk in
these localities--a suspicion due to stories we have heard and read.
But, on the other hand, it is quite sure that this fear at a certain
perception is also directly inherited. Children who have been carefully
guarded from all ghost-stories are nevertheless terrified and cry if
led into a dark place, especially if sounds are made there. Even an
adult can easily observe that an uncomfortable timidity steals over him
in a lonely wood at night, although he may have the fixed conviction
that not the slightest danger is near.
"This feeling of fear occurs in many men even in their own house after
dark, although it is much stronger in a dark cavern or forest. The fact
of such instinctive fear is easily explicable when we consider that our
savage ancestors through innumerable generations were accustomed to meet
with dangerous beasts in caverns, especially bears, and were for the
most part attacked by such beasts during the night and in the woods, and
that thus an inseparable association between the perceptions of
darkness, caverns, woods, and fear took place, and was inherited."[52]
_High places_ cause fear of a peculiarly sickening sort, though here,
again, individuals differ enormously. The utterly blind instinctive
character of the motor impulses here is shown by the fact that they are
almost always entirely unreasonable, but that reason is powerless to
suppress them. That they are a mere incidental peculiarity of the
nervous system, like liability to sea-sickness, or love of music, with
no teleological significance, seems more than probable. The fear in
question varies so much from one person to another, and its detrimental
effects are so much more obvious than its uses, that it is hard to see
how it could be a selected instinct. Man is anatomically one of the best
fitted of animals for climbing about high places. The best psychical
complement to this equipment would seem to be a 'level head' when there,
not a dread of going there at all. In fact, the teleology of fear,
beyond a certain point, is more than dubious. A certain amount of
timidity obviously adapts us to the world we live in, but the
_fear-paroxysm_ is surely altogether harmful to him who is its prey.
Fear of the supernatural is one variety of fear. It is difficult to
assign any normal object for this fear, unless it were a genuine ghost.
But, in spite of psychical-research societies, science has not yet
adopted ghosts; so we can only say that certain _ideas_ of supernatural
agency, associated with real circumstances, produce a peculiar kind of
horror. This horror is probably explicable as the result of a
combination of simpler horrors. To bring the ghostly terror to its
maximum, many usual elements of the dreadful must combine, such as
loneliness, darkness, inexplicable sounds, especially of a dismal
character, moving figures half discerned (or, if discerned, of dreadful
aspect), and a vertiginous baffling of the expectation. This last
element, which is _intellectual_, is very important. It produces a
strange emotional 'curdle' in our blood to see a process with which we
are familiar deliberately taking an unwonted course. Anyone's heart
would stop beating if he perceived his chair sliding unassisted across
the floor. The lower animals appear to be sensitive to the mysteriously
exceptional as well as ourselves. My friend Professor W. K. Brooks told
me of his large and noble dog being frightened into a sort of epileptic
fit by a bone being drawn across the floor by a thread which the dog did
not see. Darwin and Romanes have given similar experiences. The idea of
the supernatural involves that the usual should be set at naught. In the
witch and hobgoblin supernatural, other elements still of fear are
brought in--caverns, slime and ooze, vermin, corpses, and the like. A
human corpse seems normally to produce an instinctive dread, which is no
doubt somewhat due to its mysteriousness, and which familiarity rapidly
dispels. But, in view of the fact that cadaveric, reptilian, and
underground horrors play so specific and constant a part in many
nightmares and forms of delirium, it seems not altogether unwise to ask
whether these forms of dreadful circumstance may not at a former period
have been more normal objects of the environment than now. The ordinary
cock-sure evolutionist ought to have no difficulty in explaining these
terrors, and the scenery that provokes them, as relapses into the
consciousness of the cave-men, a consciousness usually overlaid in us by
experiences of more recent date.
There are certain other pathological fears, and certain peculiarities in
the expression of ordinary fear, which might receive an explanatory
light from ancestral conditions, even infra-human ones. In ordinary
fear, one may either run, or remain semi-paralyzed. The latter condition
reminds us of the so-called death-shamming instinct shown by many
animals. Dr. Lindsay, in his work 'Mind in Animals,' says this must
require great self-command in those that practise it. But it is really
no feigning of death at all, and requires no self-command. It is simply
a terror-paralysis which has been so useful as to become hereditary. The
beast of prey does not think the motionless bird, insect, or crustacean
dead. He simply fails to notice them at all; because his senses, like
ours, are much more strongly excited by a moving object than by a still
one. It is the same instinct which leads a boy playing 'I spy' to hold
his very breath when the seeker is near, and which makes the beast of
prey himself in many cases motionlessly lie in wait for his victim or
silently 'stalk' it, by stealthy advances alternated with periods of
immobility. It is the opposite of the instinct which makes us jump up
and down and move our arms when we wish to attract the notice of someone
passing far away, and makes the shipwrecked sailor upon the raft where
he is floating frantically wave a cloth when a distant sail appears.
Now, may not the statue-like, crouching immobility of some
melancholiacs, insane with general anxiety and fear of everything, be in
some way connected with this old instinct? They can give no _reason_ for
their fear to move; but immobility makes them feel safer and more
comfortable. Is not this the mental state of the 'feigning' animal?
Again, take the strange symptom which has been described of late years
by the rather absurd name of _agoraphobia_. The patient is seized with
palpitation and terror at the sight of any open place or broad street
which he has to cross alone. He trembles, his knees bend, he may even
faint at the idea. Where he has sufficient self-command he sometimes
accomplishes the object by keeping safe under the lee of a vehicle going
across, or joining himself to a knot of other people. But usually he
slinks round the sides of the square, hugging the houses as closely as
he can. This emotion has no utility in a civilized man, but when we
notice the chronic agoraphobia of our domestic cats, and see the
tenacious way in which many wild animals, especially rodents, cling to
cover, and only venture on a dash across the open as a desperate
measure--even then making for every stone or bunch of weeds which may
give a momentary shelter--when we see this we are strongly tempted to
ask whether such an odd kind of fear in us be not due to the accidental
resurrection, through disease, of a sort of instinct which may in some
of our remote ancestors have had a permanent and on the whole a useful
part to play?