A hundred other signs of animal cruelty are scattered through this book. One may collect many others, and this might form a work edifying in this era of sentimentalism. Not because one wishes--quite the contrary--to offer them to men as so many examples; but because this might teach them that the first duty of a living being is to live, and that all life is nothing but a sum sufficient of murders. Men or tigers, sphex or carabes are under the same necessity: to kill or to die, or to shed blood or eat grass. But to eat grass, is not much better than suicide: ask the lambkins. [1] Mariot-Didieux, Guide pratique de l'éducateur de lapins. Bibliothèque des professions industrielles et agricoles, série H. No. 17. CHAPTER XIX INSTINCT _Instinct.--Can one oppose it to intelligence?--Instinct in man.--Primordiality of intelligence.--Instinct's conservative rôle.--Modifying rôle of intelligence.--Intelligence and consciousness.--Parity of animal and human instinct.--Mechanical character of the instinctive act.--Instinct modified by intelligence.--Habit of work creates useless work.--Objections to the identification of instinct and intelligence taken from life of insects._ The question of instinct is perhaps the most nerve-racking there is. Simple minds think they have solved it when they have set against this word the other word: intelligence. That is merely the elementary position of the problem. Not only does it explain nothing, but it opposes all explanations. If instinct and intelligence are not phenomena of the same order, reducible one to the other, the problem is insoluble and we will never know what instinct is, nor what is intelligence. In the vulgar contrast one overhears the considerable naivete that animals have instinct and man, intelligence. This error, pure rhetoric, has prevented, up to the present, not the answer to the question which still seems a long way off, but the scientific exposure of the question itself. It includes but two formulæ: Either instinct is a fructification of intelligence; or intelligence is an augmentation of instinct. One must choose, and know that in choosing one makes, as the case may be, either instinct or intelligence, the seed or flower of a single plant: the sensibility.