When an instinct is not habit, as resulting from memory pure and simple,
it is habit modified by some treatment, generally in the youth or
embryonic stages of the individual, which disturbs his memory, and drives
him on to some unusual course, inasmuch as he cannot recognise and
remember his usual one by reason of the change now made in it. Habits
and instincts, again, may be modified by any important change in the
condition of the parents, which will then both affect the parent’s sense
of his own identity, and also create more or less fault, or dislocation
of memory, in the offspring immediately behind the memory of his last
life. Change of food may at times be sufficient to create a specific
modification—that is to say, to affect all the individuals whose food is
so changed, in one and the same way—whether as regards structure or
habit. Thus we see that certain changes in food (and domicile), from
those with which its ancestors have been familiar, will disturb the
memory of a queen bee’s egg, and set it at such disadvantage as to make
it make itself into a neuter bee; but yet we find that the larva thus
partly aborted may have its memories restored to it, if not already too
much disturbed, and may thus return to its condition as a queen bee, if
it only again be restored to the food and domicile, which its past
memories can alone remember.
So we see that opium, tobacco, alcohol, hasheesh, and tea produce certain
effects upon our own structure and instincts. But though capable of
modification, and of specific modification, which may in time become
inherited, and hence resolve itself into a true instinct or settled
question, yet I maintain that the main bulk of the instinct (whether as
affecting structure or habits of life) will be derived from memory pure
and simple; the individual growing up in the shape he does, and liking to
do this or that when he is grown up, simply from recollection of what he
did last time, and of what on the whole suited him.
For it must be remembered that a drug which should destroy some one part
at an early embryonic stage, and thus prevent it from development, would
prevent the creature from recognising the surroundings which affected
that part when he was last alive and unmutilated, as being the same as
his present surroundings. He would be puzzled, for he would be viewing
the position from a different standpoint. If any important item in a
number of associated ideas disappears, the plot fails; and a great
internal change is an exceedingly important item. Life and things to a
creature so treated at an early embryonic stage would not be life and
things as he last remembered them; hence he would not be able to do the
same now as he did then; that is to say, he would vary both in structure
and instinct; but if the creature were tolerably uniform to start with,
and were treated in a tolerably uniform way, we might expect the effect
produced to be much the same in all ordinary cases.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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