The best example of desire, from this point of view, is hunger. The
stimulus to hunger is a certain well-ascertained bodily condition.
When in this condition, an animal moves restlessly; if he sees or
smells food, he moves in a manner which, in conditions to which he is
accustomed, would bring him to the food; if he reaches it, he eats it,
and if the quantity is sufficient he then becomes quiescent. This kind
of behaviour may be summarised by saying that a hungry animal “desires”
food. It is behaviour which is in various ways different from that of
inanimate matter, because restless movements persist until a certain
condition is realised. These movements may or may not be the best
adapted to realising the condition in question. Every one knows about
the pike that was put on one side of a glass partition, with minnows
on the other side. He continually bumped his nose on the glass, and
after six weeks gave up the attempt to catch them. When, after this,
the partition was removed, he still refrained from pursuing them. I do
not know whether the experiment was tried of leaving a possibility of
getting to the minnows by a roundabout route. To have learned to take a
roundabout route would perhaps have required a degree of intelligence
beyond the capacity of fishes; this is a matter, however, which offers
little difficulty to dogs or monkeys.
What applies to hunger applies equally to other forms of “desire”.
Every animal has a certain congenital apparatus of “desires”; that
is to say, in certain bodily conditions he is stimulated to restless
activities which tend towards the performance of some reflex, and
if a given situation is often repeated the animal arrives more and
more quickly at the performance of the reflex. This last, however, is
only true of the higher animals; in the lower, the whole process from
beginning to end is reflex, and can therefore only succeed in normal
circumstances. The higher animals, and more especially men, have a
larger proportion of learning and a smaller proportion of reflexes in
their behaviour, and are therefore better able to adapt themselves
to new circumstances. The helplessness of infants is a necessary
condition for the adaptability of adults; infants have fewer useful
reflexes than the young of animals, but have far more power of forming
useful habits, which can be adapted to circumstances and are not
fatally fixed from birth. This fact is intimately connected with the
superiority of the human intelligence above that of the brutes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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