They are all 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 oppor- tunity 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, then, without troubling ourselves about the words instinct and reason, we may confidently say that however uncertain man's reactions upon his environment may some-times seem in comparison with those of lower creatures, 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 set loose the impulse the other way; and thus, though the animal richest in reason might be also the animal richest in instinctive impulses too, he would never seem the fatal automaton which a, merely instinctive animal would be.
Let us now turn to human impulses with a, little more detail.All we have ascertained so far is that impulses of an originally instinctive character may exist, and yet not betray themselves by automatic fatality of conduct.
But in mall what impulses do exist? In the light of what has been said, it is obvious that an existing impulse may not always be superficially apparent even when its object is there.And we shall see that some impulses may be masked by causes of which we have not yet spoken.TWO PRINCIPLES OF NON-UNIFORMITY IN INSTINCTS.
Were one devising an abstract scheme, nothing would be easier than to discover from an animal's actions just how many instincts he possessed.
He would react in one way only upon each class of objects with which his life had to deal; he would react in identically the same way upon every specimen of a class; and he would react invariably during his whole life.
There would be no gaps among his instincts; all would come to light without perversion or disguise.But there are no such abstract animals, and no-where does the instinctive life display itself in such a, way.Not only, as we have seen, may objects of the same class arouse reactions of Opposite sorts in consequence of slight changes in tile circumstances, in the individual object, or in the agent's inward condition; but two other principles of which we have not yet spoken, may come into play and produce results so striking that observers as eminent as Messrs.D.A.Spalding and Romanes do not hesitate to call them 'derangements of the mental constitution,'
and to conclude that the instinctive machinery has got out of gear.
These principles are those 1.Of the inhibition of instincts by habits ; and 2.Of the transitoriness of instincts.
Taken in conjunction with the two former principles -- that the same object may excite ambiguous impulses, or suggest an impulse different from that which it excites, by suggesting a remote object -- they explain any amount of departure from uniformity of conduct, without implying any getting out of gear of the elementary impulses from which the conduct flows.
1.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 rook, 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.
