Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/779

Rh, they are not produced by mental representations, nor are they in any degree at first dependent on the will. By its inevitable and mechanical character, the reflex is the contrary of the voluntary act. Yet we may say that it also is after its way a kind of matter for the will. One of the first exercises imposed by education, one of its most laborious apprenticeships, is to control the reflexes and prevent their being produced. Except for the little that the will may gain upon them, or rather upon the conditions under which they are produced, the reflexes remain substantially the same through life, with the difference, which Preyer seems to have well established, that they are slower in the new-born child than they afterward become.

The instinctive motions resemble the reflexes; they have to a certain point their mechanical character, and are produced only as in consequence of certain determined impressions. Thus, the young chick does not perform the motion of scratching on the carpet, but begins it at once on the gravel walk, as if the feeling of grains of sand was necessary and enough to set the mechanism in motion. But there is a great difference between instinct and the reflex; it is not only that instinct is more complicated and its complex motion is composed of co-ordinated movements; but it is connected with a mental disposition, and is dependent on a psychical representation and tendency, or an image and a feeling.

Some philosophers, reserving the name of instinct for the remarkable industries of some species of animals, like bees and the beaver, deny that man has instincts. But how can we dispute that true and indestructible instincts preside over the functions by which individual life and the life of the species are preserved? The truth is that, while instinct is all with certain animals, with others, more perfectible and higher in the scale by that fact, a very large part is left to the intelligent activity that can adapt itself to circumstances. This is at the maximum in man; and in the adult and cultivated man of the higher races the part of mechanism is reduced very nearly to nothing. But in the child instinct exercises all its rights, till education deranges and modifies it. The instinctive character—that is, partly psychical and not purely reflexive—of the movements composing the action of sucking, appears by the fact that the hungry child will suck at his finger as well as at the breast, while, if he is not hungry, he will refuse even the breast. It is also by instinct that he laughs when we excite him by playing with him, or even by tickling him, for, if he is in a bad humor or a stranger tries the experiment, he may cry instead of laugh. The instinctive reaction depends essentially on the psychic condition at the moment. Nevertheless, this does not prevent instinct being a hereditary mechanism, over which the