Y.M. The first animal started it, its descendants have inherited it.
O.M. How did the first one come to start it?
Y.M. I don’t know; but it didn’t think it out.
O.M. How do you know it didn’t?
Y.M. Well—I have a right to suppose it didn’t, anyway.
O.M. I don’t believe you have. What is thought?
Y.M. I know what you call it: the mechanical and automatic putting together of impressions received from outside, and drawing an inference from them.
O.M. Very good. Now my idea of the meaningless term “instinct” is, that it is merely petrified thought; solidified and made inanimate by habit; thought which was once alive and awake, but is become unconscious—walks in its sleep, so to speak.
Y.M. Illustrate it.
O.M. Take a herd of cows, feeding in a pasture. Their heads are all turned in one direction. They do that instinctively; they gain nothing by it, they have no reason for it, they don’t know why they do it. It is an inherited habit which was originally thought—that is to say, observation of an exterior fact, and a valuable inference drawn from that observation and confirmed by experience. The original wild ox noticed that with the wind in his favor he could smell his enemy in time to escape; then he inferred that it was worth while to keep his nose to the wind. That is the process which man calls reasoning. Man’s thought-machine works just like the other animals’, but it is a better one and more Edisonian. Man, in the ox’s place, would go further, reason wider: he would face part of the herd the other way and protect both front and rear.