The Natural Philosophy of Love

by Remy de Gourmont

If, on the contrary, one consider intelligence as anterior, the field of investigation stretches out to infinity and instead of one problem radically insoluble, one has a hundred thousand or more, as many as there are animal species, and of these problems none is simple, none absurd. This manner of looking at it, brings, I admit, grave consequences. One must then look at matter as a simple allotropic form of intelligence, or, if you prefer, consider intelligence and matter as equivalents, and admit that intelligence is merely matter endowed with sensibility, and that its power of extremely diversifying itself finds impassable limits in the very forms which clothe it. Instinct is the proof of these limits. When acts have become instinctive, they have become invincible. A specie is a group of instincts whose tyranny becomes, one day, deaf to all attempts at movement. Evolution is limited by the resistance of what is, striving against what might be. There comes a moment when a specie is a mass too heavy to be moved by intelligence: then it remains in its place; this is death, but is compensated by the steady arrival of other species; new forms assumed by the inexhaustible Proteus.

One will add nothing, here, to this theory, save a few facts favourable to it, and a handful of objections.

The old distinction between intelligence and instinct, although false and superficial, may be adapted to the views just abbreviated. We will attribute to instinct the series of acts which tend to conserve the present condition of a specie; and to intelligence, those which tend to modify that condition. Instinct will be slavery, subjection to custom; intelligence will represent liberty, that is to say, choice, acts which while being necessary, since they occur, have yet been determined by an ensemble of causes anterior to those which govern instinct. Intelligence will be the deep, the reserve, the spring which after long digging emerges between the rocks. In everything that intelligence suggests, the consciousness of the species makes a departure; what is useful is incorporated in instinct, enlarging and diversifying it; what is useless perishes—or perhaps flowers in extravagances, as it does in man, in dancing and gardening birds, or the magpies attracted by a jewel, larks by a mirror! One will then call instinct, the series of useful aptitudes; intelligence, the series of aptitudes de luxe: but what is useful, what useless? Who will dare brand a series of bird notes or a feminine smile as lacking utility? There is neither utility nor inutility unless there be also finality. But finality can not be considered as an aim; it is nothing but a fact, and one which might be other.

This utilization of old terms, if it were possible, could never be the pretext for a new radical differentiation between instinct and intelligence; one could only use it to define by contrast two states whose manifestations present appreciable nuances. The great objection to the essential identification of instinct and intelligence comes from a habit of mind which spiritistic philosophy has for long imposed upon us: instinct should be unconscious, intelligence, conscious. But psychological analysis does not permit us rigorously to tie intellectual activity to consciousness. Without consciousness, every thing might happen, even in the most thoughtful man, exactly as it does under the paternal eye of this consciousness. In M. Ribot's interesting analogic comparison, consciousness is an interned candle lighting a clock-face; it has the same influence on the movement of the intelligence that this candle has on the clock. It is difficult to know whether animals have consciousness, and it is perhaps useless, unless at least, one admit that this candle, by its luminous or calorific rays, does, as M. Fouillée teaches, affect the march of the mechanism. In sum, consciousness also is a fact, and no fact dies without consequences; there are neither first causes nor last causes. In any case one will, since it is evident, cling to one statement that even if consciousness is a possible reactive, intelligence can act without it: the most conscious of men have phases of unconscious intellectuality; long series of reasonable acts may be committed without their reflection being visible in the mirror, without the candle being lit before the clock. In brief, it does not seem as if nervous matter could exist without intelligence or sensibility; but consciousness is an extra. There is no need to take count of the old scholastic objection to the identification of the intelligence and the instinct.

What is there serious in the other objection: that man, if he once had instincts, has lost them?

The animal having the richest instincts ought also to have, or to have had, the richest intelligence. And reciprocally: intellectual activity supposes a greatly varied instinctive activity, either in the present or in the future. If man have not instincts, he ought to be in the way of making them. He has numerous instincts, and makes more every day: a part of his consciousness is constantly crystallizing itself into instinctive acts.

But if one consider the different instincts of animal species one will scarcely find any which are not also human. The great human activities are instinctive. Doubtless man may refrain from building a palace, but he can not dispense with a cabin, a nest in a cave, or in the fork of a tree, like the great apes, many mammals, birds, and most insects. His food depends very little on choice, it must contain certain indispensable elements: a necessity identical with that which rules the animals, and even the plants whose roots reach down toward the desired juice, and whose branches reach toward the light. Song, dance, strife, and, for the group, war; human instincts are not unknown to all animals. The taste for brilliant things, another human instinct is frequent enough in birds; it is true that birds have not yet made anything of it, and that man has evolved the sumptuary arts. There remains love, but I think this supreme instinct is the consecrated limit of the objections.

Useful acts habitually repeated may become invincible, like veritable instinctive movements. A hunter[1] spending the winter in an isolated cabin in Canada engaged an Indian woman to keep house for him. She arrives in the evening, melts the snow, begins to wash up, shifts everything, prevents his getting any sleep. He rages. Silence. As soon as he is asleep, the woman mechanically begins to work again, and so on, until the humble Indian gets the last word. Here, exactly as among insects, one has the example of work which once begun must go on until it is finished. The insect can not be interrupted; if it is interrupted by external cause it starts work again not at the point where it actually finds the work, but at the point where it, the insect, left off. Thus, one entirely removed the nest which a chalicodome was building on a shingle; the bee returns, finds nothing, since there is nothing to find, but instead of recommencing the building, continues it. There was nothing to be done but close the hole; the bee closes it, that is to say she deposits the last mouthful of mortar on the ideal dome of an absent nest: then with instinct satisfied, sure of having assured her posterity, she retires, she goes to die. One can get the same result with the pélopée, and with other builders. Processional caterpillars are accustomed to make long trips in Indian file on the branches of their native pine-tree, in search of food: if one place them on the rim of a basin they will stupidly circulate for thirty hours, without one of them having the idea of interrupting the circle by going off at a tangent. They will die in their track, stuck fast in obedience; when one falls another steps into his place, the ranks close, that is all. Here are the extremities of instinct, and to our great surprise they are almost the same in an Indian of the great lakes and in a processional pine caterpillar.

But other cases of animal's instinct joining with free intelligence, give examples of human sagacity. We have seen these same mason bees and xylocopes and domestic bees profit eagerly by a nest ready made, by a hole bored in wood, by artificial combs set ready to take their honey; the osmies, who lay in the stalks of cut reeds, in which they arrange a series of chambers, accommodated themselves under Fabre's guidance in glass tubes which permitted the great observer to know them intimately. Instinct is by turns as stupid as a machine and as intelligent as a brain; these two extremes should correspond with very ancient and very recent habits. It is certainly but a relatively short time since the peasant's pruning-bill began preparing cut reeds for the osmie; before that time she constructed her nest, as she still does, in empty snail shells or in some natural cavity. They are very interesting these osmies, extremely active solitary bees; one sees them having exhausted their ovaries, but not their muscular force, building extra nests, provisioning them with honey, without having laid a single egg in them; they will even make and close them without honey, if they do not find more flowers, thus showing a real craziness for work, an authentic mania analogous to that which moves man to move pebbles, to smoke, to drink rather than remain immobile.[2] If the osmie lived longer, she might perhaps invent some game which, vain at the start, would end by becoming both a need and a benefit to the whole species.

The theory which makes instinct a partial crystallization of intelligence is extremely seductive: I dare say we will have to accept it as true. Yet the contemplation of the insect world raises an enormous objection. In the course of his wonderful memoirs Fabre has formulated it ten times and with always fresh ingenuity. Here is the insect, nearly always born adult, and after the death of her parents, she has received from them neither direct education nor education by example, as do the young of birds or mammals. A hen teaches her chick to scratch for worms (it is true that she does not teach her ducklings to dabble in puddles, and they are her despair, to our amusement), an osmie can teach its young nothing. Yet now osmies do exactly what their ancients have done. The insect opens its shell, brushes its antennæ, performs its toilet, opens its wings, flies off for life, moves without hesitation toward the pasture it needs, recognizes and flees the enemies of its race, makes love, and finally constructs a nest identical with the cradle from which it has emerged.[3]