To put the matter in another way. Suppose that an intelligent ant
were to make observations on human behaviour as displayed in one of
our great cities or in an agricultural district. Seeing so great an
amount of routine work going on around him, might he not be in danger
of regarding all this as evidence of hereditary instinct? Might he not
find it difficult to obtain satisfactory evidence of the establishment
of our habits, of the fact that this routine work has to some extent
to be learnt? Might he not say (perhaps not wholly without truth), “I
can see nothing whatever in the training of the children of these men
to fit them for their life-work. The training of their children has no
more apparent bearing upon the activities of their after-life than
the feeding of our grubs has on the duties of ant-life. And although
we must remember,” he might continue, “that these large animals do not
have the advantage which we possess of awaking suddenly, as by a new
birth, to their full faculties, still, as they grow older, now one and
now another of their deferred instincts is unfolded and manifested.
They fall into the routine of life with little or no training as
the period proper to the various instincts arrives. If learning
thereof there be, it has at present escaped our observation. And such
intelligence as their activities evince (and many of them do show
remarkable adaptation to uniform conditions of life) would seem to be
rather ancestral than of the present time; as is shown by the fact that
many of the adaptations are directed rather to past conditions of life
than to those which now hold good. In the presence of new emergencies
to which their instincts have not fitted them, these poor men are often
completely at a loss. We cannot but conclude, therefore, that, although
shown under somewhat different and less favourable conditions, instinct
occupies fully as large a space in the psychology of man as it does in
that of the ant, while their intelligence is far less unerring and,
therefore, markedly inferior to our own.”
Of course, the views here attributed to the ant are very absurd. But
are they much more absurd than the views of those who, on the evidence
which we at present possess, attribute all the varied activities of
ant-life to instinct? Take the case of the ecitons, or military ants,
or the harvesting ants, or the ants that are said to keep draught-bugs
as beasts of burden: have we sufficient evidence to enable us to
affirm that these modes of behaviour are purely instinctive and not
intelligent; that all the varied manœuvres of the military ants, for
example, are displayed to the full without any learning or imitation,
without teaching and without intelligence on the part of every
individual in the army.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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