----- 1. The Marquess of Worcester had done all of this more than a
century earlier.
Instinct and Thought
Young Man. It is odious. Those drunken
theories of yours, advanced a while ago—concerning
the rat and all that—strip Man bare of all
his dignities, grandeurs, sublimities.
Old Man. He hasn’t any to strip—they
are shams, stolen clothes. He claims credits
which belong solely to his Maker.
Y.M. But you have no right to put him on a level
with a rat.
O.M. I don’t—morally.
That would not be fair to the rat. The rat is
well above him, there.
Y.M. Are you joking?
O.M. No, I am not.
Y.M. Then what do you mean?
O.M. That comes under the head of the Moral
Sense. It is a large question. Let us
finish with what we are about now, before we take it
up.
Y.M. Very well. You have seemed to concede
that you place Man and the rat on A level. What
is it? The intellectual?
O.M. In form—not a degree.
Y.M. Explain.
O.M. I think that the rat’s mind and the
man’s mind are the same machine, but of unequal
capacities—like yours and Edison’s;
like the African pygmy’s and Homer’s;
like the Bushman’s and Bismarck’s.
Y.M. How are you going to make that out, when
the lower animals have no mental quality but instinct,
while man possesses reason?
O.M. What is instinct?
Y.M. It is merely unthinking and mechanical
exercise of inherited habit.
O.M. What originated the habit?
Y.M. The first animal started it, its descendants
have inherited it.
O.M. How did the first one come to start it?
Y.M. I don’t know; but it didn’t
think it out.
O.M. How do you know it didn’t?
Y.M. Well—I have a right to suppose
it didn’t, anyway.
O.M. I don’t believe you have. What
is thought?
Y.M. I know what you call it: the mechanical
and automatic putting together of impressions received
from outside, and drawing an inference from them.
O.M. Very good. Now my idea of the meaningless
term “instinct” is, that it is merely
petrified thought; solidified and made inanimate
by habit; thought which was once alive and awake,
but it become unconscious—walks in its
sleep, so to speak.
Y.M. Illustrate it.
O.M. Take a herd of cows, feeding in a pasture.
Their heads are all turned in one direction.
They do that instinctively; they gain nothing by
it, they have no reason for it, they don’t know
why they do it. It is an inherited habit which
was originally thought—that is to say,
observation of an exterior fact, and a valuable inference
drawn from that observation and confirmed by experience.
The original wild ox noticed that with the wind in
