Animals possess, as a rule, the instincts of human beings, with some that are special to themselves. They have the reflex actions above enumerated; they have, even in a more decisive form, the primitive combined movements for locomotion and other pur poses; they have the spontaneous activities that come under control in their voluntary acts;•they have emotional manifestations that are emittent, although their organs of expression are fewer; they have certain rudimentary powers, which are developed by experience into the activity of the will.
There are certain intellectual judgments that in man are mainly, if not wholly, the result of experience, but in animals are instinctive. The chief of these is the appre ciation of distance and direction, which is shown in the ability to take an aim, as in birds pecking their food soon after they are born. The higher quadrupeds learn to feed themselves in a space of time too short for acquisition. It would seem also that animals have instinctive notions of things, as in the case of the aquatic animals knowing water at first sight, a fact generally affirmed, and not easy to contradict. In, the same way, they may know their food at first sight before tasting it.
It is in connection with sociability that we have the largest compass of undoubted instincts. Animals secni to know their own species by intuitive perception. Predatory animals certainly recognize their prey by instinctive perception; the young kitten is aroused by the sight of a mouse; the dog pursues a cat with a decision and vehemence that could not be given by eduction. So animals that are preyed upon intuitively dread their captors.
While pleasure and pain must be regarded as fundamental attributes of the mind, inseparable from its working, the more special modes of feeling• called emotions, as love, anger, fear, are states superinduced upon the primary modes of feeling, and as they appear from the earliest moments of life, they are properly termed instincts, being common to man and to a.nimals.
Among the most notable instincts are the constructions of forethought—as the nests of birds, the cells of bees and wasps, the ant-hillocks, the beaver's dwellings, the spider's web; also the precautionary movements of animals, as in the migrations of birds and fishes, according to season. The striking and extraordinary anecdotes given of the sagacity of some animals, as the dog, the horse, the cat, the elephant, do not, properly speaking, exemplify instinct; they involve experience, memory, and reason, which animals are capable of in a greater or less degree, and with great individual differences, even in the same species. Respecting these various instinctive aptitudes, the account given until lately was that each distinct animal species was originally created so; and that the powers belonging to each were handed clown without change from parents to offspring. A new belonging of the phenomena has been given in the doctrine of evolution. According to this doctrine, as applied to mind, instincts arc
experiences and acquisitions that have become hereditary.
"Though reflex and instinctive sequences are not determined by the experience of the individual organism manifesting them, yet the experiences of the race of organisms form ing its ancestry may have determined them. Hereditary transmission applies to mental peculiarities as well as to physical peculiarities. While the modified bodily structure produced by new habits of life is bequeathed to future generations, the modified nervous structure produced by such new habits of life are also bequeathed; and if the new habits become permanent, the tendencies become permanent. Let us glance at the facts: Among the families of a civilized society, the changes of occupation and habit from generation to generation, and the intermarriage of families having different occu pations and habits, greatly confUse the evidence of mental heredity. But it needs only to contrast national characters to see that mental peculiarities caused by habit become nereditary. We know that there are warlike, peaceful, nomadic, maritime, hunting, com mercial races—races that are independent or slavish, active or slothful; we know that many of these, if not all, have a common origin ; and hence it is inferable that these varieties of disposition, which have evident relations to modes of life, have been gradually pro duced in the course of generations. In domesticated animals, parallel facts are familiar. Not only the forms and constitutions, but the dispositions and instincts of horses, oxen, sheep, pigs. fowls, have become different from those of their wild kindred. The various breeds of dogs exhibit numerous varieties of mental character and faculty per manently established by mode of life; and their several tendencies are spontaneously manifested. A young pointer will point out a covey the first time he is taken afield" (Spencer's Psychology, vol. i., p. 422).
The strongest evidence, however, for the evolution theory is the remarkable simi larity between instincts and acquisitions. Our instincts are just the pdwers that we need for our support and preservation, and that we should acquire by trying what actions are best suited for this purpose. An animal coming into the world unable to adjust the movements of its limbs, head, and mouth, to pick up the food that lies before, it, would have to learn these movements as quickly as possible. Once acquired, they persist, and if very strongly embodied in the nervous system, they may be transmitted in a more or less perfect form to the next generation. Even granting that the trans mission is not full and complete, a sufficient trace may be left to render the acquisition comparatively short. There are a great many instincts that need a certain amount of practice to make them operative; the first attempts at locomotion in most animals are feeble and awkward.