Georges Pouchet

“ Cuvier tells us, "a faculty distinct from intelligence, which we term instinct. It makes them do acts which each individual performs without ever having seen them done, and which are repeated, from generation to generation, invariably the same. Without having learned, the animal knows; it knows from its birth, and knows so well, that it never makes a mistake, even in acts of extreme complexity, the secret of which it seems to bring with it into the world. ”

“ We may ask, Why should not the bee itself be sensitive to that harmony of lines which strikes our eye in its work? Why deny so simple an impression as that which springs from regularity, to that brain which is of tiny dimensions, it is true, but which is quick to seize relations of far greater complexity between cause and effect, quick to choose the best place, to avoid an obstacle, to pursue with eye and sting the enemy of the hive? ”

“ This bold attempt to found the scientific study of instinct is found rather indefinitely in the "Origin of Species." Darwin does not enter on the problem with deliberate purpose as a physiologist. He continues to be what he is in the whole work, the zoologist, exclusively occupied with his great theory: he foresees and meets objections; he has particularly anticipated those that might be brought against him in the name of instinct; and he gives, in a few pages, a more complete study of instinct than any philosopher had made before him, and the first study ever made by aid of experiment. ”

“ Darwin proves, in fact, that it suffices to admit the principle of intelligence, which no one now denies to animals, and then the twofold influence of habit and hereditary tendency, and last that law, stated by himself, of absorption of the poorly-endowed races by these better endowed, to reach the conclusion that the finely-perfected instinct of the bee or the ant is nothing more than a purely natural phenomenon, a necessary consequence of life. ”

“ The grand result which the introduction of Darwin's ideas into biological science has had is, beyond question, to have transformed a subject hitherto deemed unapproachable and insolvable into a question of development that may be attacked by our investigations. Instinct, like the outward forms of animals, has always been made dependent on those first causes too high for man to raise his look to them. ”

“ We know scarcely any thing of what goes on in a habitation of beavers; we know nothing of the habits of the republican sparrow, which builds a city for its nest; the insect communities are the most perfect ones that have been studied hitherto. So soon as a society exists, there are understanding and concurrence of all at every moment to reach a definite object. No zoologist now doubts that insects of the same species may communicate with each other, under certain circumstances, by a language of which the methods elude us. ”

“ Each instinct that we study displays itself to us, in a manner, under an absolute form; we never see it change; therefore it is said to be unchangeable. This is the illusion common to all phenomena that are too slow for their progress to be measured by the life or the memory of man. Yet the European beaver and the oriole give us examples of instincts that go back to a date relatively not very ancient. We know now, too, that the nests of the same species of birds sometimes present remarkable enough variations in different countries. ”

“ Modern science begins to be amazed at those figures of ages which it must count since the rude attempts at primitive human industry. What shall we think of those times, measured by the planet's growth, through which the instinct of the legionary ants may have been originated, defined, and perfected? The ant not only saw the epoch of the reindeer and the mammoth, and the glaciers of the Jura creeping down the valley of the Rhone—it was a contemporary of that period which geologists mark by the lifting of the Alps. The ant is older on the earth than Mont Blanc. ”

“ Those among animals that present the most highly-developed instinct are, unquestionably, the insects; the silky tissues of cocoons, the structures wrought by wasps, the beautiful works that are treasured in cabinets, bear witness to astonishing instinctive faculties; every thing seems to be instinct with the insects, and, if Cuvier's idea be adopted, it ought in general to be very poorly endowed as regards intelligence. ”

“ The grand solution of instinct is—Time; that immeasurable duration of those geological epochs which our mind holds in contemplation, but of which it can no more form an idea than of the measure of the heavenly spaces. ”

“ This instinct, at first confined to a few individuals of the same blood, tends to become general, since it is advantageous, and we thus fall back into a particular case of the great principle of natural selection formulated by Darwin. Let us go on. Thus far this instinct is but little complicated, since it has only the significance of a habit that one individual may have been able to take up with its share of intelligence. Now that it is seen rooted under the form of instinct, each individual in its turn, with its own share of intelligence, may be able to add something to it of its own accord. ”

“ Darwin says, in those pages in which he treats of instinct, that, if it were possible to prove that a habit might become hereditary, all distinction between habit and instinct would absolutely vanish. Darwin's literary procedure is that of always urging his reader further than he seems to go himself. He suggests the best arguments in the world with a doubtful air, and one is every moment surprised to find one's self so strongly convinced when the author seems convinced so little. ”

“ Does it not become indispensable to measure these faculties exactly in the case in which instinct is most developed? Suppose we were to find, contrary to Cuvier's opinion, that instinct, far from being inversely proportioned to the degree of intelligence, is just the reverse, and is greater, according as intelligence is more active.
This really is the truth, and it is important to fix this first point clearly in the study of instinct. Human inferiority in point of instinct is perhaps only apparent, since education hardly allows us to guess what we should be without it. ”

“ We are beginning, with our better knowledge, to ask whether those intellectual and instinctive faculties, arranged by Cuvier in two parallel series, may not have some common bond, so that one would flow from the other, and instinct, after all, be definitely a product of intelligence. The question has its importance. Instinct would then no longer be one of those essential properties of living beings which absolutely elude our comprehension, such as thought in the brain, contraction in the muscles, the electricity of the eel, or the gleam of the glow-worm ”

“ Modern geology questions these violent commotions, and Darwin, taking up in his turn Lamarck's ideas, after fifty years of scientific progress, maintains, by almost irresistible arguments, that animal forms, instead of being unchangeable, as Cuvier supposed, are slowly modified, under the control of time, of circumstances, and of the energies with which each individual and each race "fight the battle of existence." That individual which brings into life a slight yet advantageous modification of its organs will succeed better in life than another. ”

“ He understood animals much better than Descartes; he loves them, he plays with his cat, and this intercourse enlightens him; he speaks with sound judgment of the too narrow share of intelligence allowed to animals by man, while he himself "goes soaring in imagination beyond the orbit of the moon." ”

“ Man too has his instinct, as animals have. By instinct the new-born child feels for and finds its mother's breast; but instinctive phenomena in man are less easy to determine, and their discovery demands careful research, because intelligence usually veils them. And yet intelligence is not wanting in animals either, only with them instinct has that predominance which intelligence takes in man."
With the exception of a few mistakes in details, Cuvier marked very accurately the line between the instinctive and the intellectual faculties, but he went no further. ”

“ The small size of the being, its life wholly alien to our own, the predominance of instinct, are all so many impediments; but, on the other hand, the acts we see them perform under our very eyes, the admitted existence of faculties that may be compared with our own, and those of a relatively high order, allow of very little doubt that not only do insects possess a remarkably-developed intelligence, but that this intelligence presents, in consequence of its very development, individual variations, just as in the higher animals. ”

“ He ignores instinct as an essential property, and treats it as a function—that is, he explains it. Instinct, as he holds, is nothing but a result from the intellectual faculties, properly so called, modified in a particular way under the twofold power of habit and inherited influence.
Inherited tendency, like intelligence, is one of those properties peculiar to living beings of which we can prove the existence, while its principle completely and absolutely baffles investigation. ”

“ Those individuals that have these instincts in the hive or in the ant-hill are neuters—that is to say, they are neither male nor female, and must consequently die without posterity. How explain the way in which a habit acquired by a neuter can be transmitted, can grow into an instinct, in the neuters of following generations, which will not descend from that first one? Yet the difficulty is not so great as it seems, and Darwin points it out very well. ”

“ If the European beaver did once build huts, where shall we find more decisive testimony in favor of the theory of mutability in instincts? Pursued for his warm covering and his flesh, he has changed his instincts, before invading civilization, more rapidly than his external form. It is a point well established at this day that the contact with man has had a decisive effect on the instinct of many animals. ”

“ The European beaver, inhabiting the affluents of the Rhone and the Danube, is scarcely to be distinguished from the American beaver, yet he has quite a different kind of work to do. The American beaver, on his lakes and great, lonely rivers, builds the famous houses so well known; the European beaver burrows long galleries underground in the manner of moles. If he has always done so, what becomes of that supposed necessary correlation between the organs and the instinct of a burrowing animal on one continent, a building animal on the other, with the same members for two objects so different? ”

“ The female, as we know, wraps up her newly-laid egg in a ball of manure, the nourishment for the coming grub. The point now is to transport the ball into a suitable place, where it may be buried. The insect rolls along, with its hind-claws, or, if necessary, hoists with its head, this little world, in which the Egyptians found an emblem for their myths. Sometimes the journey is pretty long; the ball, lifted to the ridge of a mole-hill, rolls down the other side, and so much is gained. ”

“ He makes no attempt whatever to measure the reciprocal influence of these two kinds of faculties in the very complex acts of insect-life; and, above all, he refrains from the study of their intelligence, full of interest as it is. "Individuals of the same species," he says, "always perform the same works without having learned any thing; instinct alone guides them." Yet, together with this instinct, as M. Blanchard himself admits, there are faculties of intellect, which offer greater difficulties of study by reason of the existence of those instinctive faculties. ”

“ When we attempt to pierce the mystery by which the plant that springs from the yelk seed, the bird that grows from the yelk, will be more like the plant or the bird it proceeds from than like any other, we confront the impenetrable unknown. Hereditary tendency does not merely carry down from one generation to another all the imaginable modifications of form, size, coloring; it extends to the cerebral faculties, transmitted doubtless by the help of some physical peculiarity of the organ of intelligence. ”

“ Philosophers and moralists do not in our time concern themselves with the relations or the differences between instinct and intelligence; for they have no means of solving problems that particularly concern biology. Without going farther back, we remember Descartes's strange notion of animal machines, adopted by Bossuet, and the whole seventeenth century; but at this time biologists in their turn attack the problem ”

“ The most complex instinct is merely an hereditary accumulation of very simple habits, of which the first source was always in the spontaneous intelligence of the individual. Instinct, then, including that of neuter animals, may be defined, "a group of habits, slowly acquired, and fixed by inheritance." ”

“ Let us suppose that a certain number of neuters may have brought from birth a favorable organic modification into a community of insects, and that by this the community has prospered; the males and females who have produced these neuters will then have, by them, the greatest possible chances of posterity. It may happen thenceforward that they transmit to their descendants what they had themselves—that is to say, the property of procreating neuters having the same favorable organic modification—and we thus fall back into the common process of natural selection. Such is Darwin's explanation ”

“ LET us now dwell a little on two grand facts presented to us by the animated world, these two properties of living beings equally undeniable and unintelligible in their essence—habit, and hereditary tendency; and let us see how, in Darwin's theory, they will combine with intelligence. ”