OCR Text |
Show 1884.] OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND OF THE SPECIES. 473 apart from both the active force of the artist and the ideal conceptions which direct that force-Me cause of the production of the statue. They are a cause, they help to produce it, and are absolutely necessary for its production. They are a material cause, but hot the primary cause. This distinction runs through all spheres of activity. The formal discoverer of a new fossil is the naturalist who first sees it with an instructed eye, appreciates, and describes it; not the labourer who accidentally uncovers but ignores it, and who cannot be accounted to be, any more than the spade he handles, other than a mere material cause of its discovery. So we must regard the destructive agencies of Nature as a material cause of the origin of new species; their formal cause being the reaction of the nature of their parent organisms upon the sum of the multitudinous influences of their environment. This kind of action of " the organism "-this formal cause-has been compared by Mr. Alfred Wallace, and by me, with the action of the organism in its embryonic development; and this, I have further urged, is to be likened to the processes of repair and reproduction of parts of the individual after injury, and this, again, to reflex action, and, finally, this last to Instinct as manifested in ourselves and in other animals also. These relations of similarity appear to me to exist between Instinct and all the various other vital actions just enumerated. Instead, then, of explaining Instinct by reflex action1 (as a reflex action accompanied by sensation), I would explain reflex action, processes of repair, and processes of individual and specific evolution, by Instinct-the wonderful action and nature of which we know as it exists in our own personal activity. These seem to me to be all diverse manifestations of one kind of activity of which Instinctive Action is the best type, because by it we can tc a certain extent understand the others, whereas none of the others enable us to understand it. Instinct contains reflex action, but reflex action does not contain Instinct2. But instinctive action has a wider range still. The evolution of language, of literature, of art, of science, of politics, are also embraced by it, in so far as they take place without the intervention of conscious and deliberate intention ; for no one can pretend that human progress in these various directions was at first evolved by any such deliberate and intentional action. Let us glance at some simple form of language to test the truth of this assertion, supposing a case in which a man and a brute are simultaneously stimulated to expression by the same influences, that we may more 1 To attempt to explain Instinct by reflex action is an attempt to explain it by omitting its most eminent characteristic-its practically telic nature-its direction to a future, unforeseen, but generally useful end. It is like the attempt to explain the building of a house by bricks, mortar, bricklayers, and hodmen, omitting all reference to any influence governing their motions and directing them towards a predetermined end which is not theirs. 2 Professor Carpenter informs m e that in a paper of his on the Voluntary and Instinctive Actions of Living Beings (to be found in No. 132 of the old 'Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal'), read in 1837, he pointed out the essential similarity between Instinct and Reflex Action. |