Fully and Partially Organized Instincts
Insects afford the best examples of very highly organized instincts. Their behavior is extremely regular and predictable, their progress towards the end-result of an instinct remarkably straightforward and sure. They make few mistakes, and do not have to potter around. By contrast, the instincts of mammals are rather loosely organized. Mammals are more plastic, more adaptable, and at the same time less sure; and this is notably true of man. It would be a mistake to suppose that man has few instinctive tendencies; perhaps he has more than any other creature. But his instinctive behavior has not the hard-and-fast, ready-made character that we see in the insects. Man is by all odds the most pottering, hem-and-hawing of animals. Instinct does not lead him straight to his goal, but makes him seek this way and that till he finds it. His powers of observation, memory and thought are drawn into the game, and thus instinct in man is complicated and partly concealed by learning and reasoning.
For example, when an insect needs a nest, it proceeds in orderly fashion to construct a nest of the pattern instinctive to that species of insect; but when a man needs a home, he goes about it in a variable, try-and-try-again [{112}] manner, scheming, experimenting, getting suggestions from other people, and finally producing--a dugout, a tree house; a wigwam, a cliff dwelling--something that differs altogether from many other human habitations, except in the fact that it is a habitation and thus satisfies a need which is undoubtedly as instinctive in man as in the insect.
A fully organized instinct is one where the necessary preparatory reactions are linked up closely with the main reaction-tendency, so that, once the main tendency is aroused to activity, the preparatory reactions follow with great sureness. The main team of neurones is closely connected with the subordinate teams that give the preparatory reactions; and these connections do not have to be acquired by experience and training, but are well formed by native growth. Just the right preparatory reactions are linked to the main tendency, so that the whole series of acts is run off with great regularity.
In a loosely organized instinct, the main tendency is not firmly linked with any specific preparatory reactions, but is loosely linked with a great many preparatory reactions, and so gives quite variable behavior, which, however, leads on the whole towards the main goal.
While a creature under the spell of a fully organized instinct is busy, one driven by a loosely organized instinct may be better described as restless. He tries this thing and that, and goes through the kind of behavior that is called "trial and error". A closely knit instinct, then, gives a perfectly definite series of preparatory reactions, while a loosely organized instinct gives trial and error behavior. We shall see later how trial and error furnishes a starting point for learning, and how, in an animal that can learn, those among the trial-and-error reactions that are actually preparatory to the end-result become firmly attached to the main tendency, so that what was by native constitution a loosely [{113}] organized instinct may become, through the individual's experience, a closely organized habit. If a man has occasion to build himself many homes, he comes, after a while, to build almost as uniformly and surely as an insect.