Whether it makes instinct a "compound reflex," or a habit formed
intelligently that has become automatism, or a sum of small accidental
advantages accumulated and fixed by selection, in every case science
claims to resolve instinct completely either into _intelligent_ actions,
or into mechanisms built up piece by piece like those combined by our
_intelligence_. I agree indeed that science is here within its function.
It gives us, in default of a real analysis of the object, a translation
of this object in terms of intelligence. But is it not plain that
science itself invites philosophy to consider things in another way? If
our biology was still that of Aristotle, if it regarded the series of
living beings as unilinear, if it showed us the whole of life evolving
towards intelligence and passing, to that end, through sensibility and
instinct, we should be right, we, the intelligent beings, in turning
back towards the earlier and consequently inferior manifestations of
life and in claiming to fit them, without deforming them, into the molds
of our understanding. But one of the clearest results of biology has
been to show that evolution has taken place along divergent lines. It is
at the extremity of two of these lines--the two principal--that we find
intelligence and instinct in forms almost pure. Why, then, should
instinct be resolvable into intelligent elements? Why, even, into terms
entirely intelligible? Is it not obvious that to think here of the
intelligent, or of the absolutely intelligible, is to go back to the
Aristotelian theory of nature? No doubt it is better to go back to that
than to stop short before instinct as before an unfathomable mystery.
But, though instinct is not within the domain of intelligence, it is not
situated beyond the limits of mind. In the phenomena of feeling, in
unreflecting sympathy and antipathy, we experience in ourselves--though
under a much vaguer form, and one too much penetrated with
intelligence--something of what must happen in the consciousness of an
insect acting by instinct. Evolution does but sunder, in order to
develop them to the end, elements which, at their origin,
interpenetrated each other. More precisely, intelligence is, before
anything else, the faculty of relating one point of space to another,
one material object to another; it applies to all things, but remains
outside them; and of a deep cause it perceives only the effects spread
out side by side. Whatever be the force that is at work in the genesis
of the nervous system of the caterpillar, to our eyes and our
intelligence it is only a juxtaposition of nerves and nervous centres.
It is true that we thus get the whole outer effect of it. The Ammophila,
no doubt, discerns but a very little of that force, just what concerns
itself; but at least it discerns it from within, quite otherwise than by
a process of knowledge--by an intuition (_lived_ rather than
_represented_), which is probably like what we call divining sympathy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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