MR. SPALDING ON INSTINCT.
MR. DOUGLAS SPALDING has been making some very curious and instructive experiments on the instincts of chickens hooded by himself from the moment of their birth till they were several days old, from which be has clearly established that their instinctive power of calculating distance, distinguishing objects which will serve them for food, and aiming at and swallow- ing them, is absolutely instinctive, i.e., requires no lessons of experience on this side of the eggshell to make it perfect. The experiments and the inferences he draws from them are the sub- jects of a very striking article in Macmillan's Magazine for the present month. "A hungry chick that never tasted food is able, on seeing a fly or a spider for the first time, to bring into action muscles that were never so exercised before, and to perform a series of delicately adjusted movements that end in the capture of the insect." Mr. Spalding says of the chickens which were the subjects of his experiment that, when first un- hooded, "almost invariably they seemed a little stunned by the light, remained motionless for several minutes, and continued for some time less active than before they were unheeded. Their behaviour, however, was in every case conclusive against the theory that the perceptions of distance and direction by the eye are the result of experience, of associations
formed in the history of each individual life. Often at the end of two minntes they followed with their eyes the movements of crawling insects, turning their heads with all the precision of an old fowl. In from two to fifteen minutes they pecked at some speck or insect, showing not merely an in- stinctive perception of distance, but an original ability to judge, to measure distances with something like infallible accuracy. They did not attempt to seize things beyond their reach, as babies are said to grasp at the moon ; and they may be said to have invariably hit the objects at which they struck,—they never missed by more than a hair's-breadth, and that, too, when the specks at which they aimed were no
bigger and leis visible than the smallest dot of an To seize between the points of the mandibles at the very instant of striking seemed a more difficult operation. I have seen a chicken seize and swallow an insect at the first attempt ; most frequently, how- ever, they struck five or six times, lifting once or twice before succeeding in swallowing their first food." The experiments in hear- ing were no leas demonstrative of the chicken's instinctive power of judging both of the significance of sounds and the direction from which they came. "Chickens hatched and kept in the said bag for a day or two, when taken out and placed nine or ten feet from a box in which a hen with chicks was concealed, after standing for a minute or two, uniformly set off straight for the box in answer to the call of the hen, which they had never seen and never before heard. This they did, struggling through grass and ever rough ground when not yet able to stand steadily on their legs. Nine chickens were thus experimented upon, and each in- dividual gave the same positive results, running to the box scores of times and from every possible position. To vary the experiment, I tried the effects of the mother's voice on hooded chickens. These, when left to themselves, seldom made a forward step—their move- ments were round and round and backward; but when placed within five or six feet of the mother, they, in answer to her call, became much more lively, began to make little forward journeys, and soon followed her by sound alone, though of course blindly, keep- ing their heads close to the ground, and knocking against almost everything that lay in their path. Only three chickens were made subjects of this experiment." From all which, and many other observations for which we must refer our readers to Macmillan's Magazine, Mr. Douglas Spalding justly
infers that the chicken's sight-perceptions of both direction and distance are properly instinctive, and that its sound-perceptions of direction are also instinctive.
But Mr. Spalding's inference from these facts is the very reverse of that of Paley and the other 'Natural' theologians of Paley's school. He is a very strong materialist in this sense that he believes in "the intimate and invariable dependence of all kinds of mental facts on nervoas organisation ;"—further, that nervous
organisations are inherited, and that so all the mental facts which depend on nervous organisation are susceptible of inheritance. He is disposed evidently to hold that such instincts as he has illustrated arise somewhat in this way :—Some primeval hen or chicken learnt slowly and painfully to measure distance, and to discover direc- tion, much as a child learns or would learn without a parent ; its offspring inherited a nervous organisation affected by these acquired habits, and therefore more capable of their acquisi- tion, till at length the inherited facility of learning became by slow steps an inherited facility to dispense with learning,— the nervous organisation having become at the very time of birth as well adapted to direct the chicken's eye and ear to its food, as it had been in long previous generations after half a life's individual teaching and experience. ,It does not matter, Mr. Spalding thinks, how a nervous organisation got to be what it is, whether by the experience of ancestors and the transmission of the modifications caused by that experience, or by the experience of the individual ; the only real question is what is the nervous organisation ? If the same modification is there, the mental phenomena due to that modification will be there, whether the explanation is to be found in the life of the individual or in the life of the ancestry. So far does Mr. Spalding go, that he expressly states his belief that if you could imagine a duplicate man to be suddenly created, with all the material organisms and all the nervous modifications of some existing friend, the duplicate man would also be at once a duplicate friend, would have the same memories, the same knowledge, the same expectations, the same beliefs, the same doubts, and the same affections. The difficulty lies not in getting the duplicate friend without the dupli- cate experience, but in getting the duplicate physical organisation without the duplicate experience; if you could auyhow manage the latter feat, if by any process you could find a mode of obtaining a physical fac-simile of every organism without identity of individual experience, you would have ipso facto accomplished also the former feat ; you would have got the duplicate of any particular friend's personal affections and feeling towards yourself, without his having had any of the moral experience by which in the original's case it was first obtained. And so far as inheritance goes, Mr. Spalding thinks inheritance is a mode of obtaining to a very small extent a physical fac-simile of certain nervous modifications without the experience which led to those modifications ; in a word, inheritance is a short cut not to duplicate identity,--because it never gets nearly so far, —but to a certain degree of identity of mental constitution with your ancestors,—enough to give you from the first the command of certain keys to locks, of which they had mastered the secret only by more or less difficult experience.
We suspect Mr. Spalding, though evidently a very acute observer and naturalist, is a very hasty and inexperienced psychologist, or
he would hardly have rushed into this extreme and, we must add, very instructive logical exposition of materialism as the natural
inference to be suggested by the facts before him. Did it never strike him that exceedingly imperfect as our power of investi- gating this class of facts through consciousness is, that power is yet enough to prove that the nervous modifications derived by inheritance from our ancestors tend to set up a similar state of mind in relation only to the future, but never to identify or even confuse our past with theirs? The nervous modifications we inherit undoubtedly affect our powers and our tastes, and pro- bably our affections, but never in the smallest degree even tend to enlarge our memories, so as to give us a vicarious command of the experience by which our ancestors trained and gained the powers they have transmitted to us. Yet if Mr. Spalding's theory had the slightest scientific evidence, this would have been in all probability among the first-fruits of inheritance. Of course, we have no means of knowing with regard to Mr. Spalding's turkey which had never before in its life seen a hawk, —having indeed been adopted by Mr. Spalding while still in the shell,—and which yet on its tenth day of life was so alarmed by the note of a hawk secreted in a cupboard, that it fled in the direction opposite to the cupboard with every sign of terror, whether the nervous modi- fication which caused its terror caused also anything like a memory of any of the cruel experiences of hawks to which its ancestors had been subjected. But so far as we can test instinctive fears
in our own case, we do know that there is no trace or sign of the co-existence of such causal memories with those fears. Nay, in the case of the most clearly inherited intellectual genius,--such as lin- gniatic, or mathematical, or musical capacities inherited from our ancestors,—we do know that there has never been a trace of that backward-looking -" nervous modification" which we suppose Mr. Spalding would call "memory," in connection with the forward- looking "nervous modification" which we call capacity or genius. If MI% Spalding were right it would be a marvellous fact, that great powers of language transmitted (say) to one whose forefathers had spoken English since there was firstan English language, should not be accompanied by so much as an inborn knowledge of the com- monest English word ; for the "nervous modifications" which give linguistic power, must be in their origin the very same as the "nervous modifications" which are produced by linguistic attain- ments; and if there be no intermediate link between the two in the individual mind which uses these nervous modifications, one sees no reason why the actual acquisitions should not be transmitted just as easily as the powers of acquisition. There is not, indeed, a psychological trace anywhere to be found in the human constitution of Mr. Spalding's materialistic doctrine that not only powers, but memories and a more or less imperfect sense of personal identity would be inherited in so far precisely as the nervous constitution of our parents is inherited. If it were so, we might almost expect to have cases of sons inheriting not only their parents' tastes, but theirindividual affections,—of their inherit- ing brotherly or sisterly affections towards uncles and aunts they had never seen, and personal hatreds of martinet oppressors of their parents' childhood with whom they had never met. We should doubt if Mr. Spalding's very logical expression of the doctrine of nnaterialism would find favour with a single careful psychologist who had studied the facts of human consciousness.
Moreover, Mr. Spalding gives us in his very able and iatere sting paper a class of facts concerning animal instinct which seem, if not positively inconsistent with his view, yet all but inconceiv- able on the lines of his own wild theory. For instance, he points out what is very curious, and must be of the first moment in relation to the theory of instinct,—that there are in the young of many animals various temporary instincts, usually developed in the first days-of infancy, which, if from any cause the external stimulus which leads to their appearance be belated, cannot be afterwards developed at all. He states; forinstanoe, that babies if spoon-fed and not put to the breast, soon lose the power of drawing milk, and can- not be taught it later in their infancy. So, too, the chicken which, if it hears the call of its mother within the first few days, will immediately respond to it, will, if kept out of hearing of it for ten days, hear it "as if it heard it not." In one such case at least, though the hen followed the chicken, and did all in her power to entice it, "it continually left her, and ran to the house, or to any person of whom it caught sight,"—in fact, it had gained the habit of following human beings ia its infancy, instead of the more natural habit of following the hen. Again, Mr. Spalding noticed that if the chickens were unhooded within the first three days, they followed about at once the person who un- hooded them, but when the unhooding was deferred till the fourth day, this following instinct had been superseded by the instinct of timidity and caution ; "each of them on being unhooded evinced the greatest terror of me, dashing off in the opposite direction whenever I sought to approach it." The instinct was one, says Mr. Spalding, proceeding from the organisation of the very young chicken ; if that organisation had got beyond the earliest stage, it had got out of gear for developing this instinct, and the more permanent instinct of caution, due to its later and more permanent organisation, took its place. So, too, he treats the chicken's instinct for breaking the shell, like the physical organ by which the process is performed, as a necessary result of the temporary infant organisation of the chicken : —" By a regular series of strokes the shell is cat in two,—chipped right round in a perfect circle some distance from the great end. More- over, the bird has a special instrument for this work, a hard sharp horn on the top of the upper mandible, which, being re- quired for no other purpose, disappears in a few days. Obviously each individual bird no more acquires the art of breaking its way out than it furnishes itself with the little pick-hammer used in the operation; and it is equally clear that a bird could never have escaped from the egg without this instinct." But, he adds, by way of illustrating his theory of the simple dependence of all temporary instincts on temporary physical organisation : —" If our human intelligence should so trace the constitution of living forma as to be able to say, Thus was developed the bill-scale wherewith birds now break their way out of the shells' it will possibly be able to add, 'And these were- the experiences to which we must trace the instinct that makes every little bird its own skilful aceouchear.' " Now, in this curious account of belated instinct which fails to develop itself altogether after its normal time of doing an is passed, and of temporary organs provided for a. very temporary work and which then disappear with the use for that weak, though Mr. Spalding appears to think he is furnishing himself with a new argument for the simple reference of instinct to mere physical organisation, he seems to us to be adducing very grave objections to his own belief. The problem to be explained is the exact relation between an inward power and the outward world, between the chicken's temporary pick-hammer and the shell it has to break,—between its methodical mode of using that tem- porary provision and the urgent necessity for its liberation from the shell ; between its instinct of following and the maternal instinct of leadership and care ; between its instinct of attraction by the mother's voice and the mother's instinct to call. Now, the fact that these inward and outward arrangements comespond for a very short time,—so short, that if you artificially delay the moment of applying the stimulus, the instinct never appears at all, but is superseded by some instinct proper to a later stage of the creature's life,—is surely a fresh difficulty- in the way of explaining the whole matter by physical organisa- tion without relation to overruling purpose. The point to be explained is the exact correspondence between the instinct and the external conditions, and the more you diminish. the time during which such a correspondence can. take effect,, the more marvellous that correspondence between apparently in- dependent phenomena, coinciding not only- in regard to space, bat with regard to time, becomes ; and what is more important, the less probable it becomes that inheritance, without pre-arrangement, will explain the coincidence. An instinct which exists only for a day or two, and then, if not excited into action, disappears, may of course, be as easily ascribed to a temporary "nervous modifies-. tion " as any other more permanent instinct, but its exact con, currence with equally temporary "nervous modifications" isa another creature, to which nervous modifications, it owes its- mem development, is a new riddle. Undoubtedly it is most natural be account for this exact concurrence in both time and space between very short-lived and very different "nervous modifications," by a mind or purpose overruling both ; and if so, then, of course, the very same account could be given of the relation of each nervous modification to the instinct which. springs out of it. It is, at any rate, enormously difficult to suppose that the means of breaking a shell and the instinct to break it in a workmanlike manner, can ever have been gradually:acquired and gradually perfected and transmitted by former fowls to their descendants ; for till the pick-hammer organ had grown, it could not have been used, and unless it had been used, there could have been no life and no transmission. But it is still more difficult to suppose that a hen could gradually have acquired the instinct of calling to chickens, not merely at the only time when the chickens wanted protection and help, but at the exact time when the chicken, on its side was gradually acquiring the instinct of following- to her call ; and yet that the instinct should have had so little permanent basis in the creature's organisation, that a day or two's procrastination would show the instinct to have dropped altogether. This, we say, is almost incredible, and yet it is this that Mr. Spalding, who speaks with perfect scorn of intellectual purpose as an unscientific explanation, requires of us to believe. incredulity- of one kind is almost always credulity of another.
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