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.
One will first establish that for manifestations of instinct and for those of intelligence, there is no essential difference between man and animals. The life of all men, quite as well as that of all animals, is based on instinct, and doubtless there is no animal who can not give signs of spontaneity, that is to say, of intelligence. Instinct seems anterior because in all animals except man the quantity and especially the quality of instinctive facts greatly surpasses the value and number of intellectual facts. This is so, but in admitting this hierarchy, if one thereby explain with considerable difficulty, the formation of intelligence in man and in the animals which show more or less perceptible gleams of it, one also renounces by so doing, all later attempts that might furnish some notions as to the formation of instinct. If the bee makes his combs mechanically, if this act is as necessary as the evaporation of warmed water, or the crystallization of freezing water, it is useless to search any further: one is in the presence of a fact which will never yield anything else.