One might, indeed, go still further with safety, and expect that, if such a captive squirrel were then set free, he would never afterwards acquire this peculiar instinct of his tribe.
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 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, matters us with a sense of power over it, and makes us feel not altogether out of the pale.
Whatever individual exceptions might be cited to this 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.
The natural conclusion to draw from this transiency of instincts is that most instincts are implanted for the sake of giving rise to habits, and that, this purpose once accomplished, the instincts themselves, as such, have no raison d'être in the psychical economy, and consequently fade away.That occasionally an instinct should fade before circumstances permit of a habit being formed, or that, if the habit be formed, other factors than the pure instinct should modify its course, need not surprise us.Life is full of the imperfect adjustment to individual cases, of arrangements which, taking the species as a whole, are quite orderly and regular.Instinct cannot be expected to escape this general risk. SPECIAL HUMAN INSTINCTS.
Let us now test our principles by turning to human instincts in more detail.We cannot pretend in these pages to be minute or exhaustive.But we can say enough to set all the above generalities in a more favorable light.But, first, what kind of motor reactions upon objects shall we count as instincts? This, as aforesaid, is a somewhat arbitrary matter.Some of the actions aroused in us by objects go no further than our own bodies.
Such is the bristling up of the attention when a novel object is perceived, or the 'expression' on the face or the breathing apparatus of an emotion it may excite.These movements merge into ordinary reflex actions like laughing when tickled, or making a wry face at a bad taste.Other actions take effect upon the outer world.Such are flight from a wild beast, imitation of what we see a comrade do, etc.On the whole it is best to be catholic, since it is very hard to draw an exact line; and call both of these kinds of activity instinctive, so far as either may be naturally provoked by the presence of special sorts of outward fact.
