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Show 208 ~ INSTINCT. CIIAP. VII. But I could show that none of these characters of instinct are universal. A little dose, as Pierre H~ber expresses I' t, of J'udgment or re. ason, often fc omes Into play, even in animals very low In the scale o nature. Frederick Cuvier and se;eral ~f the ~lderr m~taphysicians have compared instinct with habit. Tlus. comparison gives, I think, a re~arkably. ac~ura~e noti_on ~f the frame of mind under whwh an Instinctive action Is performed, but not of its origin. H?w unconsciously many habitual actions are perfo~med, .Indeed not rarely in direct opposition to our conscious will! yet they may be modified by the will or reason. Habits easily become associated with other habits, and with certain periods of time and states of the body. When once acquired, they often remain constant throughout life. Several other points of resemblance between instincts and habits could be pointed out. As in repeating a well-known song, so in instincts, one action follows another by a sort of rhythm ; if a person be interrupted in a song, or in repeating anything by rote, he is generally forced to go back to recover the habitual train of thought : so P. Huber found it was with a caterpillar, which makes a very complicated hammock; for if he took a caterpillar which had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth stage of construction, and put it into a hammock completed up only to the third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of construction. If, however, a caterpillar were taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its work was already done for it, far from feeling the benefit of this, it was much embarrassed, and, in order to complete its hammock, seemed forced to start from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus tried to complete the already finished work. .CHAP. VII. INSTINC'l' LIKE HABIT. 209 If we suppose any habitual action to become inherited- and I think it can be shown that this does sometimes happen-then the resemblance between what originally was a habit and an instinct becomes so close as no~ to be distinguished. If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly be said to have done so instinctively. But it would be the most serious error to suppose that the ~reater numbe: of instincts have been acquired by habit In one generatwn, and then transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations. It can be clearly shown that the most wonderful instincts vtrith which we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and of many ants, could not possibly have been thus acquired. It will be universally admitted that instincts are as important as corporeal structur'e for the welfare of each species, under its present conditions of life. Under changed conditions of life, it is at least possible that slight modifications of instinct might be profitable to a species; and if it can be shown that instincts do vary ever so little, then I can see no difficulty in natural selection preserving and continually accumulating variati~ ns of instinct to any extent that may be profitable. It Is thus, as I believe, that all the most complex and wonderful instincts have originated. As modifications of corporeal structure arise from, and are increased by, use or habit, and are diminished or lost by disuse, so I do not doubt it has been vtrith instincts. But 1 believe that the effects of habit are of quite subordinate importance to the eff~cts of the natural selection of what may be called accidental variations of instincts ·-that is of variations ~roduced by the same unknown ~auses which produce slight deviations of bodily structure. . No complex instinct can possibly be produced through |