THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON INSTINCT IN BIRDS AND MAN.
THE Duke of Argyll has written a very entertaining and, in its earlier portion, a very graphic paper in the new (July) Contemporary Review, on "Instinct in its Relation to the Mind of Man." He describes with much vivacity three cases of birds' instinct which had recently come under his own personal observa- tion ;—the instinct which taught a young dipper or water-ousel, hatched, as it was in this particular case, out of sight of the water, how to behave when it first stumbled on the water for which its physical constitution fitted it ;—the instinct which taught a young dun-diver or red-breasted Merganser not only to use its swimming and diving powers to escape pursuit, but to turn to advantage the singular likeness of its plumage to the shore, by crouching on it, without stirring a feather, while the pursuer was examining (and missing) the very spot on which it lay concealed ; and finally, the instinct which taught a common wild duck when her nest and young were in danger from a dog to simulate the movements of a wounded bird incapable of flight, fluttering helplessly away from the enemy, simply in order to divert the dog sufficiently from the nest which must otherwise have been detected by the dog, if only by the sense of smell. In all three cases, the Duke of Argyll points out very clearly how recondite the adaptations are which thus availed the birds in question,—for instance, that the instinct which led to the motionless attitude of the young Merganser on the ground was one which even in the most distant ancestry could never have been taught to the young bird by its parents, since the plumage of the mature bird does not suit it for this manoeuvre, and is accordingly one which it never adopts, and this though the manoeuvre depends for its success on the most absolute stillness, since the fluttering of a feather would betray the bird ; nay, further, that this absolute stillness must be preserved amidst the fear and terror which the close approach of the pursuer inspires, and which but a moment before or a moment after, when it is on the lake, leads the bird not to this breathless stillness, but to the most agile and rapid flight. So, again, he explains that the strategic mimicry of a helpless and wounded condition which is so favourite an expedient of the wild duck for the purpose of leading her natural enemies away from her nest, could hardly have been learned through the experience of any tribe of birds, since wild ducks can have few opportunities of studying each other's behaviour when wounded. Indeed, if one out of a flock is wounded all the others make haste to escape ; so that this imitated helplessness,—seldom resorted to, by the way, according to the Duke of Argyll, unless a dog is in pursuit, the feint being, in fact, of no avail with man,—is practised by birds which never had any opportunity at all of noting how wounded birds con- duct themselves. The Duke infers, then, that no hypothesis is wilder than the supposition that these instincts are the organised products of the experience of former generations of birds. On this head he says with great force :— " We shall find that the theory of experience assumes the pre-ex- istence of the very powers for which it professes to account. The very lowest of the faculties by which experience is acquired is the faculty of imitation. But the desire to imitate must be as instinctive as the organs are hereditary by which imitation is effected. Then follow in their order all the higher faculties by which the lessons of experience are put together—so that what has been in the past is made the basis of anticipation as to what will be in the future. This is the essential process by which experience is acquired, and every step in that process assumes the pre-existence of mental tendencies and of mental powers which are purely instinctive and innate. To account for instinct by experience is nothing but an Irish bull. It denies the existence of things which are nevertheless assumed in the very terms of the denial : it elevates into a cause that which must in its nature be a consequence, and a conse- quence, too, of the very cause which is denied. Congenital instincts, and hereditary powers, and pre-established harmonies, are the origin of all experience, and without them no one step in experience could ever be gained."
Then the Duke points out very clearly what kind of knowledge in the case of the wild duck's strategy would be involved in the conscious adaptation of the means pursued to the end in view:— " If now we examine, in the light of our own reason, all the elements of knowledge or of intellectual perception upon which the instinct of the wild duck is founded, and all of which, as existing somewhere, it undoubtedly reflects, we shall soon see how various and extensive these elements of knowledge are. First, there is the knowledge that the cause of the alarm is a carnivorous animal. On this fundamental point no creature is ever deceived. The youngest chick knows a hawk, and the dreadful form fills it with instant terror. Next, there is the knowledge that dogs and other carnivorous quadrupeds have the sense of smell, as an additional element of danger to the creatures on which they prey. Next, there is the knowledge that the dog, not being itself a flying animal, has sense enough not to attempt the pursuit of prey which can avail itself of this sure and easy method of escape. Next, there is the conclusion from all this knowledge, that if the dog is to be induced to chase, it must be led to suppose that the power of flight has
been somehow lost. And then there is the farther conclusion, that this can only be done by such an accurate imitation of a disabled bird as shall deceive the enemy into a belief in the possibility of capture. And lastly, there are all the powers of memory and the qualities of imagina- tion which enable good acting to be performed. All this reasoning and all this knowledge is certainly involved in the action of a bird-mother, just as certainly as reasoning and knowledge of a much profounder kind is involved in the structure or adjustment of the organic machinery by which and through which the action is itself performed."
The Duke further points out that the most elaborate and recon- dite of all animal instincts, especially in relation to the provision for their young, are apt to belong to the lowest types of animal life,—to many kinds of insects, for instance, which lay their eggs in situations very delicately fitted for the hatching and feeding of their young,—while the higher types, the mammals, make much less apparently far-sighted provision for their offspring.
And then the Duke of Argyll goes on to apply these hints, by discussing the analogies between human reason and these automatic instincts of animal life. This last part of his essay is hardly as clear as the first, but if we understand him rightly, his view is that the organic principles of human sensibility, perception, and reason all involve machinery (and machinery far more elaborate than any of the instincts just discussed), for leading men to choose means of which they do not, and could not, know the efficacy, to ends which they could not possibly foresee ; whence the Duke infers that in any sense in which the phenomena of the lower orders of animals: can be explained by the 'automatic' theory, the highest order of mental phenomena must, in a large sense, be referred tuthe same principles of explanation,—in other words, to very elaborate adjustments between that which is around us and that which is within us, such as we could never have contrived for ourselves, and if we could, could never have so contrived that they would answer purposes of which the persons who were first to:use and profit by them, never dreamt. Just as the pleasure which food gives, is in some close correlation with the unsuspected power of the organism to assimilate and appropriate the chemical elements of that food, so we understand the Duke to argue that the pleasure which disinterested sympathy, for instance, or knowledge, or poetical genius bestows, is in equally close correlation with the unsuspected power of the mind to appropriate to itself and use for its own growth and development, the spiritual fruits of sympathy, and knowledge, and poetical genius. His position is, that in all these spheres of consciousness we choose means of which we do not know the power, to ends of which we cannot gauge the real significance and value, just as the wild duck does when it acts the part of a helpless and wounded bird in order to draw off the dog on a useless chase. It may, perhaps, be one historic illustration of the Duke's meaning to remind ourselves that sensibility to the beauty of women led men into both poetry and chivalry, which poetry and chivalry produced the love of letters, and a new and very power- ful instrument for the higher organisation of human society, neither of which causes could have been detected in the germ of the movements generated ;—again, that the laws of perception and sensibility combined led to the growth of the fine arts, without any one's suspecting that the growth of the fine arts would lead to new scientific, new moral, and new religious conceptions of the greatest possible importance to human society ;—and that the laws of reasoning led to glimpses of geometrical and astronomical truth, without suggesting any dream to those who first entered on these inquiries, that the pursuit of these lines of investigation would transform the physical condition of the world, and give new laws to its industry. This, or something like this, is, we suppose, what the Duke of Argyll means when he says :-
" We see it to be a great law prevailing in the instincts of the lower animals, and in our own, that they are true not only as guiding the ani- mal rightly to the satisfaction of whatever appetite is immediately con- cerned, but true also as ministering to ends of which the animal knows nothing, although they are ends of the highest importance, both in its own economy, and in the far-off economies of creation. In direct pro- portion as our own minds and intellects partake of the same nature, and are founded on the same principle of adjustment, we may feel assured that the same law prevails over their nobler work and functions. And the glorious law is no less than this—that the work of Instinct is true not only for the short way it goes, but for that infinite distance into which it leads in a true direction. I know no argument better fitted to dispel the sickly dreams of the Philosophy of Nescience. Nor do I know of any other conception as securely founded on science, properly so called, which better serves to render intelligible, and to bring within the familiar analogies of Nature, even those highest and rarest of all gifts which constitute what we understand as inspiration. That the human mind is always in some degree, and that certain individual minds have been in a special degree, reflecting-surfaces, as it were, for the verities of the
unseen and eternal world, is a conception having all the characters of coherence which assures us of its harmony with the general constitution and course of things."
But these higher faculties are all moulded on the same model as the lowest animal instincts:—"I hold that we can know and can almost thoroughly understand the instincts of the lower animals, and this for the best of all reasons, that we are ourselves animals, whatever more,—having to a large extent pre- cisely the same instincts, with the additional capacity of looking down on ourselves in this capacity from a higher elevation,—to which we can ascend at will." We suppose this means that just as when we clear our windpipe of a crumb which has accidentally got down it by mechanical means admirably adapted for the purpose, but of the mode of operation of which we have no consciousness, so in more recondite mental processes we find instinctive impulses guiding us, as, for instance, in the case of the manoeuvres of parental affection, which can be only compared to the stratagem of the wild duck as regards both the unconscious character of their origin and the elaborateness of their machinery.
However, we suspect that the Duke is hardly correct in all he urges on this branch of his subject. The completest instincts of man remain, we think, coiled up in the organs of the body, as in the case we have referred to of the cough which expels a foreign substance from the windpipe. So soon as we ascend into the region of the affections and the intellect at all, there is that tendency for reflection to mingle with and take the place of instinct, which creates a great gulf between us and the lower animals. A human mother battling for her children exhibits much less of instinctive feint and much more of conscious stratagem than the wild duck of the Duke's essay. The life of the affections in men, instinctive as it is in origin, is thoroughly permeated by thought,—and this thought very much alters its character. We can still less follow the Duke when he identifies the intellectual intuitions with automatic in- stincts as phenomena of an analogous kind, though of a different order. He says :—" This is indeed the essential character of all the axioms, or self-evident propositions which are the basis of reasoning, that the truth of them is perceived by an act of apprehension, which if it depends on any process, depends on a process unconscious, involuntary, and purely automatic." Now we do not see what can be meant by calling an " apprehension " "unconscious." There may be no self-consciousness in it, but it is not an apprehension of truth at all if it be unconscious. And so, too, the phrase " purely automatic " has no meaning when applied to an intuition which, so far as it goes, is intellectual. A cough is automatic, because we have no knowledge of the "why" in it. But no truth can be automatically apprehended, unless the word "automatically" be used in a perfectly new sense. The only one of the Duke's three words applied to the ultimate perceptions of reason which appears to us ap- plicable to them, is the word "involuntary." To say that we draw the conclusion from the premisses involuntarily is true ;—we could not help it, if we would. But to say that we draw it automatically is not true. The automaton "Psycho," we suppose, picks out the right card in his game of whist at the Egyptian Hall automatically, unconsciously, and involuntarily ; but the three players who play with him, even where they exercise no choice, but only obey the rules of the game, i.e., follow their own habits of mind, do not do so either unconsciously or automatically, though it may be that they do so involuntarily. There is, as far as we can see, only this truth in the Duke's identification of intuitions with instincts,—that in- tuitions, like instincts, when followed out, lead us far beyond the apparent scope of their own range, into truths as in- appreciable and inconceivable to those who are at the begin- ning of the chain of reasoning, as is the issue of the insect's instinct for selecting the right place in which to deposit its eggs to the creature which obeys it. The 'light of reason' leads us much further beyond what we can imagine when we first re- cognise its elementary lessons, than even the most elaborate machinery of instinct leads the creature guided by it. This is true, and is perhaps the real gist of the Duke's remark. And it is also the case, no doubt, that these elementary axioms or in- tuitions are derived from glimpses of truths embodied in the uni- verse, or as the Duke finely says, are shapes mirrored in those 'reflecting-surfaces' of truth which we call minds, and are not mere composite structures which could he analysed into previous experiences. But though intellectual intuitions so far resemble instincts that they are not the equivalents of past experience, and lead to results far beyond themselves, results which no one could have imagined to be involved in anything so simple, still they differ from all true instincts by carry- ing their own meaning and interpretation in them,—by being seen by their own light, which instincts are not. In
other words, they represent conscious convictions, instead of unconscious and automatic impulses. That there is an element common to instincts and to intuitions, we admit ; no doubt the latter are in some sense developments of the former, but with something so new and characteristic added, that they can never be really identified with instincts at all. The Duke of Argyll has done good service in bringing out the analogy which connects instincts and intuitions, but he has endangered the value of his own teaching by insisting too much on the resemblance and too little on the difference.
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