We may surmise that they began by being implied in each other, that the
original psychical activity included both at once, and that, if we went
far enough back into the past, we should find instincts more nearly
approaching intelligence than those of our insects, intelligence nearer
to instinct than that of our vertebrates, intelligence and instinct
being, in this elementary condition, prisoners of a matter which they
are not yet able to control. If the force immanent in life were an
unlimited force, it might perhaps have developed instinct and
intelligence together, and to any extent, in the same organisms. But
everything seems to indicate that this force is limited, and that it
soon exhausts itself in its very manifestation. It is hard for it to go
far in several directions at once: it must choose. Now, it has the
choice between two modes of acting on the material world: it can either
effect this action _directly_ by creating an _organized_ instrument to
work with; or else it can effect it _indirectly_ through an organism
which, instead of possessing the required instrument naturally, will
itself construct it by fashioning inorganic matter. Hence intelligence
and instinct, which diverge more and more as they develop, but which
never entirely separate from each other. On the one hand, the most
perfect instinct of the insect is accompanied by gleams of intelligence,
if only in the choice of place, time and materials of construction: the
bees, for example, when by exception they build in the open air, invent
new and really intelligent arrangements to adapt themselves to such new
conditions.[63] But, on the other hand, intelligence has even more need
of instinct than instinct has of intelligence; for the power to give
shape to crude matter involves already a superior degree of
organization, a degree to which the animal could not have risen, save on
the wings of instinct. So, while nature has frankly evolved in the
direction of instinct in the arthropods, we observe in almost all the
vertebrates the striving after rather than the expansion of
intelligence. It is instinct still which forms the basis of their
psychical activity; but intelligence is there, and would fain supersede
it. Intelligence does not yet succeed in inventing instruments; but at
least it tries to, by performing as many variations as possible on the
instinct which it would like to dispense with. It gains complete
self-possession only in man, and this triumph is attested by the very
insufficiency of the natural means at man's disposal for defense against
his enemies, against cold and hunger. This insufficiency, when we strive
to fathom its significance, acquires the value of a prehistoric
document; it is the final leave-taking between intelligence and
instinct. But it is no less true that nature must have hesitated between
two modes of psychical activity--one assured of immediate success, but
limited in its effects; the other hazardous, but whose conquests, if it
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