"Though the instinct be different, yet still it is an instinct
which teaches a man to avoid the fire, as much as that which
teaches a bird, with such exactness, the art of incubation and the
whole economy and order of its nursery."--(IV. pp. 125, 126.)
The parallel here drawn between the "avoidance of a fire" by a man and
the incubatory instinct of a bird is inexact. The man avoids fire when
he has had experience of the pain produced by burning; but the bird
incubates the first time it lays eggs, and therefore before it has had
any experience of incubation. For the comparison to be admissible, it
would be necessary that a man should avoid fire the first time he saw
it, which is notoriously not the case.
The term "instinct" is very vague and ill-defined. It is commonly
employed to denote any action, or even feeling, which is not dictated by
conscious reasoning, whether it is, or is not, the result of previous
experience. It is "instinct" which leads a chicken just hatched to pick
up a grain of corn; parental love is said to be "instinctive"; the
drowning man who catches at a straw does it "instinctively"; and the
hand that accidentally touches something hot is drawn back by
"instinct." Thus "instinct" is made to cover everything from a simple
reflex movement, in which the organ of consciousness need not be at all
implicated, up to a complex combination of acts directed towards a
definite end and accompanied by intense consciousness.
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