Lastly, all instinctive actions give us an impression of absolute security and infallibility. With instinct the will is never hesitating or weak, as it is when inferences are being drawn consciously. We never find instinct making mistakes; we cannot, therefore, ascribe a result which is so invariably precise to such an obscure condition of mind as is implied when the word presentiment is used; on the contrary, this absolute certainty is so characteristic a feature of instinctive actions, that it constitutes almost the only well-marked point of distinction between these and actions that are done upon reflection. But from this it must again follow that some principle lies at the root of instinct other than that which underlies reflective action, and this can only be looked for in a determination of the will through a process that lies in the unconscious, [115a] to which this character of unhesitating infallibility will attach itself in all our future investigations.
Many will be surprised at my ascribing to instinct an unconscious knowledge, arising out of no sensual impression, and yet invariably accurate. This, however, is not a consequence of my theory concerning instinct; it is the foundation on which that theory is based, and is forced upon us by facts. I must therefore adduce examples. And to give a name to the unconscious knowledge, which is not acquired through impression made upon the senses, but which will be found to be in our possession, though attained without the instrumentality of means, [115b] I prefer the word “clairvoyance” [115c] to “presentiment,” which, for reasons already given, will not serve me. This word, therefore, will be here employed throughout, as above defined.
Let us now consider examples of the instincts of self-preservation, subsistence, migration, and the continuation of the species. Most animals know their natural enemies prior to experience of any hostile designs upon themselves. A flight of young pigeons, even though they have no old birds with them, will become shy, and will separate from one another on the approach of a bird of prey. Horses and cattle that come from countries where there are no lions become unquiet and display alarm as soon as they are aware that a lion is approaching them in the night. Horses going along a bridle-path that used to leave the town at the back of the old dens of the carnivora in the Berlin Zoological Gardens were often terrified by the propinquity of enemies who were entirely unknown to them. Sticklebacks will swim composedly among a number of voracious pike, knowing, as they do, that the pike will not touch them. For if a pike once by mistake swallows a stickleback, the stickleback will stick in its throat by reason of the spine it carries upon its back, and the pike must starve to death without being able to transmit his painful experience to his descendants. In some countries there are people who by choice eat dog’s flesh; dogs are invariably savage in the presence of these persons, as recognising in them enemies at whose hands they may one day come to harm. This is the more wonderful inasmuch as dog’s fat applied externally (as when rubbed upon boots) attracts dogs by its smell. Grant saw a young chimpanzee throw itself into convulsions of terror at the sight of a large snake; and even among ourselves a Gretchen can often detect a Mephistopheles. An insect of the genius bombyx will seize another of the genus parnopæa, and kill it wherever it finds it, without making any subsequent use of the body; but we know that the last-named insect lies in wait for the eggs of the first, and is therefore the natural enemy of its race. The phenomenon known to stockdrivers and shepherds as “das Biesen des Viehes” affords another example. For when a “dassel” or “bies” fly draws near the herd, the cattle become unmanageable and run about among one another as though they were mad, knowing, as they do, that the larvæ from the eggs which the fly will lay upon them will presently pierce their hides and occasion them painful sores. These “dassel” flies—which have no sting—closely resemble another kind of gadfly which has a sting. Nevertheless, this last kind is little feared by cattle, while the first is so to an inordinate extent. The laying of the eggs upon the skin is at the time quite painless, and no ill consequences follow until long afterwards, so that we cannot suppose the cattle to draw a conscious inference concerning the connection that exists between the two. I have already spoken of the foresight shown by ferrets and buzzards in respect of adders; in like manner a young honey-buzzard, on being shown a wasp for the first time, immediately devoured it after having squeezed the sting from its body. No animal, whose instinct has not been vitiated by unnatural habits, will eat poisonous plants. Even when apes have contracted bad habits through their having been brought into contact with mankind, they can still be trusted to show us whether certain fruits found in their native forests are poisonous or no; for if poisonous fruits are offered them they will refuse them with loud cries. Every animal will choose for its sustenance exactly those animal or vegetable substances which agree best with its digestive organs, without having received any instruction on the matter, and without testing them beforehand. Even, indeed, though we assume that the power of distinguishing the different kinds of food is due to sight and not to smell, it remains none the less mysterious how the animal can know what it is that will agree with it. Thus the kid which Galen took prematurely from its mother smelt at all the different kinds of food that were set before it, but drank only the milk without touching anything else. The cherry-finch opens a cherry-stone by turning it so that her beak can hit the part where the two sides join, and does this as much with the first stone she cracks as with the last. Fitchets, martens, and weasels make small holes on the opposite sides of an egg which they are about to suck, so that the air may come in while they are sucking. Not only do animals know the food that will suit them best, but they find out the most suitable remedies when they are ill, and constantly form a correct diagnosis of their malady with a therapeutical knowledge which they cannot possibly have acquired. Dogs will often eat a great quantity of grass—particularly couch-grass—when they are unwell, especially after spring, if they have worms, which thus pass from them entangled in the grass, or if they want to get fragments of bone from out of their stomachs. As a purgative they make use of plants that sting. Hens and pigeons pick lime from walls and pavements if their food does not afford them lime enough to make their eggshells with. Little children eat chalk when suffering from acidity of the stomach, and pieces of charcoal if they are troubled with flatulence. We may observe these same instincts for certain kinds of food or drugs even among grown-up people, under circumstances in which their unconscious nature has unusual power; as, for example, among women when they are pregnant, whose capricious appetites are probably due to some special condition of the fœtus, which renders a certain state of the blood desirable. Field-mice bite off the germs of the corn which they collect together, in order to prevent its growing during the winter. Some days before the beginning of cold weather the squirrel is most assiduous in augmenting its store, and then closes its dwelling. Birds of passage betake themselves to warmer countries at times when there is still no scarcity of food for them here, and when the temperature is considerably warmer than it will be when they return to us. The same holds good of the time when animals begin to prepare their winter quarters, which beetles constantly do during the very hottest days of autumn. When swallows and storks find their way back to their native places over distances of hundreds of miles, and though the aspect of the country is reversed, we say that this is due to the acuteness of their perception of locality; but the same cannot be said of dogs, which, though they have been carried in a bag from one place to another that they do not know, and have been turned round and round twenty times over, have still been known to find their way home. Here we can say no more than that their instinct has conducted them—that the clairvoyance of the unconscious has allowed them to conjecture their way. [119a]
Before an early winter, birds of passage collect themselves in preparation for their flight sooner than usual; but when the winter is going to be mild, they will either not migrate at all, or travel only a small distance southward. When a hard winter is coming, tortoises will make their burrows deeper. If wild geese, cranes, etc., soon return from the countries to which they had betaken themselves at the beginning of spring, it is a sign that a hot and dry summer is about to ensue in those countries, and that the drought will prevent their being able to rear their young. In years of flood, beavers construct their dwellings at a higher level than usual, and shortly before an inundation the field-mice in Kamtschatka come out of their holes in large bands. If the summer is going to be dry, spiders may be seen in May and April, hanging from the ends of threads several feet in length. If in winter spiders are seen running about much, fighting with one another and preparing new webs, there will be cold weather within the next nine days, or from that to twelve: when they again hide themselves there will be a thaw. I have no doubt that much of this power of prophesying the weather is due to a perception of certain atmospheric conditions which escape ourselves, but this perception can only have relation to a certain actual and now present condition of the weather; and what can the impression made by this have to do with their idea of the weather that will ensue? No one will ascribe to animals a power of prognosticating the weather months beforehand by means of inferences drawn logically from a series of observations, [119b] to the extent of being able to foretell floods. It is far more probable that the power of perceiving subtle differences of actual atmospheric condition is nothing more than the sensual perception which acts as motive—for a motive must assuredly be always present—when an instinct comes into operation. It continues to hold good, therefore, that the power of foreseeing the weather is a case of unconscious clairvoyance, of which the stork which takes its departure for the south four weeks earlier than usual knows no more than does the stag when before a cold winter he grows himself a thicker pelt than is his wont. On the one hand, animals have present in their consciousness a perception of the actual state of the weather; on the other, their ensuing action is precisely such as it would be if the idea present with them was that of the weather that is about to come. This they cannot consciously have; the only natural intermediate link, therefore, between their conscious knowledge and their action is supplied by unconscious idea, which, however, is always accurately prescient, inasmuch as it contains something which is neither given directly to the animal through sensual perception, nor can be deduced inferentially through the understanding.
Most wonderful of all are the instincts connected with the continuation of the species. The males always find out the females of their own kind, but certainly not solely through their resemblance to themselves. With many animals, as, for example, parasitic crabs, the sexes so little resemble one another that the male would be more likely to seek a mate from the females of a thousand other species than from his own. Certain butterflies are polymorphic, and not only do the males and females of the same species differ, but the females present two distinct forms, one of which as a general rule mimics the outward appearance of a distant but highly valued species; yet the males will pair only with the females of their own kind, and not with the strangers, though these may be very likely much more like the males themselves. Among the insect species of the strepsiptera, the female is a shapeless worm which lives its whole life long in the hind body of a wasp; its head, which is of the shape of a lentil, protrudes between two of the belly rings of the wasp, the rest of the body being inside. The male, which only lives for a few hours, and resembles a moth, nevertheless recognises his mate in spite of these adverse circumstances, and fecundates her.
Before any experience of parturition, the knowledge that it is approaching drives all mammals into solitude, and bids them prepare a nest for their young in a hole or in some other place of shelter. The bird builds her nest as soon as she feels the eggs coming to maturity within her. Snails, land-crabs, tree-frogs, and toads, all of them ordinarily dwellers upon land, now betake themselves to the water; sea-tortoises go on shore, and many saltwater fishes come up into the rivers in order to lay their eggs where they can alone find the requisites for their development. Insects lay their eggs in the most varied kinds of situations,—in sand, on leaves, under the hides and horny substances of other animals; they often select the spot where the larva will be able most readily to find its future sustenance, as in autumn upon the trees that will open first in the coming spring, or in spring upon the blossoms that will first bear fruit in autumn, or in the insides of those caterpillars which will soonest as chrysalides provide the parasitic larva at once with food and with protection. Other insects select the sites from which they will first get forwarded to the destination best adapted for their development. Thus some horseflies lay their eggs upon the lips of horses or upon parts where they are accustomed to lick themselves. The eggs get conveyed hence into the entrails, the proper place for their development,—and are excreted upon their arrival at maturity. The flies that infest cattle know so well how to select the most vigorous and healthiest beasts, that cattle-dealers and tanners place entire dependence upon them, and prefer those beasts and hides that are most scarred by maggots. This selection of the best cattle by the help of these flies is no evidence in support of the conclusion that the flies possess the power of making experiments consciously and of reflecting thereupon, even though the men whose trade it is to do this recognise them as their masters. The solitary wasp makes a hole several inches deep in the sand, lays her egg, and packs along with it a number of green maggots that have no legs, and which, being on the point of becoming chrysalides, are well nourished and able to go a long time without food; she packs these maggots so closely together that they cannot move nor turn into chrysalides, and just enough of them to support the larva until it becomes a chrysalis. A kind of bug (cerceris bupresticida), which itself lives only upon pollen, lays her eggs in an underground cell, and with each one of them she deposits three beetles, which she has lain in wait for and captured when they were still weak through having only just left off being chrysalides. She kills these beetles, and appears to smear them with a fluid whereby she preserves them fresh and suitable for food. Many kinds of wasps open the cells in which their larvæ are confined when these must have consumed the provision that was left with them. They supply them with more food, and again close the cell. Ants, again, hit always upon exactly the right moment for opening the cocoons in which their larvæ are confined and for setting them free, the larva being unable to do this for itself. Yet the life of only a few kinds of insects lasts longer than a single breeding season. What then can they know about the contents of their eggs and the fittest place for their development? What can they know about the kind of food the larva will want when it leaves the egg—a food so different from their own? What, again, can they know about the quantity of food that will be necessary? How much of all this at least can they know consciously? Yet their actions, the pains they take, and the importance they evidently attach to these matters, prove that they have a foreknowledge of the future: this knowledge therefore can only be an unconscious clairvoyance. For clairvoyance it must certainly be that inspires the will of an animal to open cells and cocoons at the very moment that the larva is either ready for more food or fit for leaving the cocoon. The eggs of the cuckoo do not take only from two to three days to mature in her ovaries, as those of most birds do, but require from eleven to twelve; the cuckoo, therefore, cannot sit upon her own eggs, for her first egg would be spoiled before the last was laid. She therefore lays in other birds’ nests—of course laying each egg in a different nest. But in order that the birds may not perceive her egg to be a stranger and turn it out of the nest, not only does she lay an egg much smaller than might be expected from a bird of her size (for she only finds her opportunity among small birds), but, as already said, she imitates the other eggs in the nest she has selected with surprising accuracy in respect both of colour and marking. As the cuckoo chooses the nest some days beforehand, it may be thought, if the nest is an open one, that the cuckoo looks upon the colour of the eggs within it while her own is in process of maturing inside her, and that it is thus her egg comes to assume the colour of the others; but this explanation will not hold good for nests that are made in the holes of trees, as that of sylvia phænicurus, or which are oven-shaped with a narrow entrance, as with sylvia rufa. In these cases the cuckoo can neither slip in nor look in, and must therefore lay her egg outside the nest and push it inside with her beak; she can therefore have no means of perceiving through her senses what the eggs already in the nest are like. If, then, in spite of all this, her egg closely resembles the others, this can only have come about through an unconscious clairvoyance which directs the process that goes on within the ovary in respect of colour and marking.
An important argument in support of the existence of a clairvoyance in the instincts of animals is to be found in the series of facts which testify to the existence of a like clairvoyance, under certain circumstances, even among human beings, while the self-curative instincts of children and of pregnant women have been already mentioned. Here, however, [124] in correspondence with the higher stage of development which human consciousness has attained, a stronger echo of the unconscious clairvoyance commonly resounds within consciousness itself, and this is represented by a more or less definite presentiment of the consequences that will ensue. It is also in accord with the greater independence of the human intellect that this kind of presentiment is not felt exclusively immediately before the carrying out of an action, but is occasionally disconnected from the condition that an action has to be performed immediately, and displays itself simply as an idea independently of conscious will, provided only that the matter concerning which the presentiment is felt is one which in a high degree concerns the will of the person who feels it. In the intervals of an intermittent fever or of other illness, it not unfrequently happens that sick persons can accurately foretell the day of an approaching attack and how long it will last. The same thing occurs almost invariably in the case of spontaneous, and generally in that of artificial, somnambulism; certainly the Pythia, as is well known, used to announce the date of her next ecstatic state. In like manner the curative instinct displays itself in somnambulists, and they have been known to select remedies that have been no less remarkable for the success attending their employment than for the completeness with which they have run counter to received professional opinion. The indication of medicinal remedies is the only use which respectable electro-biologists will make of the half-sleeping, half-waking condition of those whom they are influencing. “People in perfectly sound health have been known, before childbirth or at the commencement of an illness, to predict accurately their own approaching death. The accomplishment of their predictions can hardly be explained as the result of mere chance, for if this were all, the prophecy should fail at least as often as not, whereas the reverse is actually the case. Many of these persons neither desire death nor fear it, so that the result cannot be ascribed to imagination.” So writes the celebrated physiologist, Burdach, from whose chapter on presentiment in his work “Bhicke in’s Leben” a great part of my most striking examples is taken. This presentiment of deaths, which is the exception among men, is quite common with animals, even though they do not know nor understand what death is. When they become aware that their end is approaching, they steal away to outlying and solitary places. This is why in cities we so rarely see the dead body or skeleton of a cat. We can only suppose that the unconscious clairvoyance, which is of essentially the same kind whether in man or beast, calls forth presentiments of different degrees of definiteness, so that the cat is driven to withdraw herself through a mere instinct without knowing why she does so, while in man a definite perception is awakened of the fact that he is about to die. Not only do people have presentiments concerning their own death, but there are many instances on record in which they have become aware of that of those near and dear to them, the dying person having appeared in a dream to friend or wife or husband. Stories to this effect prevail among all nations, and unquestionably contain much truth. Closely connected with this is the power of second sight, which existed formerly in Scotland, and still does so in the Danish islands. This power enables certain people without any ecstasy, but simply through their keener perception, to foresee coming events, or to tell what is going on in foreign countries on matters in which they are deeply interested, such as deaths, battles, conflagrations (Swedenborg foretold the burning of Stockholm), the arrival or the doings of friends who are at a distance. With many persons this clairvoyance is confined to a knowledge of the death of their acquaintances or fellow-townspeople. There have been a great many instances of such death-prophetesses, and, what is most important, some cases have been verified in courts of law. I may say, in passing, that this power of second sight is found in persons who are in ecstatic states, in the spontaneous or artificially induced somnambulism of the higher kinds of waking dreams, as well as in lucid moments before death. These prophetic glimpses, by which the clairvoyance of the unconscious reveals itself to consciousness, [126] are commonly obscure because in the brain they must assume a form perceptible by the senses, whereas the unconscious idea can have nothing to do with any form of sensual impression: it is for this reason that humours, dreams, and the hallucinations of sick persons can so easily have a false signification attached to them. The chances of error and self-deception that arise from this source, the ease with which people may be deceived intentionally, and the mischief which, as a general rule, attends a knowledge of the future, these considerations place beyond all doubt the practical unwisdom of attempts to arrive at certainty concerning the future. This, however, cannot affect the weight which in theory should be attached to phenomena of this kind, and must not prevent us from recognising the positive existence of the clairvoyance whose existence I am maintaining, though it is often hidden under a chaos of madness and imposture.
The materialistic and rationalistic tendencies of the present day lead most people either to deny facts of this kind in toto, or to ignore them, inasmuch as they are inexplicable from a materialistic standpoint, and cannot be established by the inductive or experimental method—as though this last were not equally impossible in the case of morals, social science, and politics. A mind of any candour will only be able to deny the truths of this entire class of phenomena so long as it remains in ignorance of the facts that have been related concerning them; but, again, a continuance in this ignorance can only arise from unwillingness to be convinced. I am satisfied that many of those who deny all human power of divination would come to another, and, to say the least, more cautious conclusion if they would be at the pains of further investigation; and I hold that no one, even at the present day, need be ashamed of joining in with an opinion which was maintained by all the great spirits of antiquity except Epicurus—an opinion whose possible truth hardly one of our best modern philosophers has ventured to contravene, and which the champions of German enlightenment were so little disposed to relegate to the domain of old wives’ tales, that Goethe furnishes us with an example of second sight that fell within his own experience, and confirms it down to its minutest details.
Although I am far from believing that the kind of phenomena above referred to form in themselves a proper foundation for a superstructure of scientific demonstration, I nevertheless find them valuable as a completion and further confirmation of the series of phenomena presented to us by the clairvoyance which we observe in human and animal instinct. Even though they only continue this series [128] through the echo that is awakened within our consciousness, they as powerfully support the account which instinctive actions give concerning their own nature, as they are themselves supported by the analogy they present to the clairvoyance observable in instinct. This, then, as well as my desire not to lose an opportunity of protesting against a modern prejudice, must stand as my reason for having allowed myself to refer, in a scientific work, to a class of phenomena which has fallen at present into so much discredit.
I will conclude with a few words upon a special kind of instinct which has a very instructive bearing upon the subject generally, and shows how impossible it is to evade the supposition of an unconscious clairvoyance on the part of instinct. In the examples adduced hitherto, the action of each individual has been done on the individual’s own behalf, except in the case of instincts connected with the continuation of the species, where the action benefits others—that is to say, the offspring of the creature performing it.