of intelligence know of biological ends? Mr. Marshall’s subjective
criterion applies just as much to a wide range of intelligent behaviour
as it does to instinctive actions.
In accepting, therefore, Spence’s statement that when animals
behave instinctively they perform, without a knowledge of the end
in view, certain actions tending to their own well-being and the
preservation of the species, we must take it in connection with the
preceding limitation, remembering that they are also performed without
instruction and experience.
A further point for very brief consideration is suggested by the
phrase in which Spence says that animals are _all alike_ impelled to
the performance of certain actions. As it stands it is too sweeping
and general. Still, we do require some explicit statement of the
facts which he had in mind when he wrote the words “all alike.” And
we find it with sufficient exactness in Dr. Peckham’s definition,
where he comprises under the category of instinctive behaviour “all
complex acts which are performed previous to experience, and _in a
similar manner by all members of the same sex and race_.” This places
congenital behaviour in line with morphological structure as a subject
for comparative treatment.
One more question remains. What shall we understand by “complex acts”?
In the first place, it is well to restrict the term instinctive
to _co-ordinated_ actions; and this implies the presence of
nerve-centres by which the co-ordination is effected. We thus exclude
the organic behaviour of plants, since there is no evidence in the
vegetable kingdom of co-ordinating centres. In the second place, the
co-ordination is, as we have seen, congenital, and not acquired in the
course of individual experience. Young water-birds, and indeed young
chicks, as soon as they are born, and have recovered from the shock
of birth, can swim with definite co-ordination of leg movements. Here
the definiteness is not only congenital, but _connate_, if we use the
latter term for an instinctive activity which is performed at or very
shortly after birth. On the other hand, young swallows cannot fly at
birth; they are then too immature, and their wings are not sufficiently
developed. But when they are some three weeks old, and the wings have
attained functional size and power, little swallows can fly with
considerable if not perfect skill. The co-ordination is congenital,
for it is not acquired in the course of individual experience; but it
is not connate, since it is not exhibited at or shortly after birth.
The term _deferred_ may be applied to such congenital activities as
are thus carried out when the animal has undergone a certain amount of
further development after birth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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