INTELLECTUAL INSTINCTS.*

THE valuable portion of this little book is the first,—on what we may call the Intellectual Instincts. The second, on Reason, could not be discussed to much purpose, even succintly, within the brief limits of Sir George Ramsay's book, but he has done good service in bringing pointedly before the philosophical world the large instinctive element which still remains unexplained at the basis of all our intellectual operations. It is too common to confine the notion of instinct to active processes, and the result has been a fatal narrowing of the whole ffeld of discussion on this subject. In fact intellectual instinct is quite as important as active instinct, and is usually involved in it. Instinctive acts and emotions are those, as Sir G. Ramsay reminds us, which are, in the individual at least, original, not slowly built up out of association and habit—which are involuntary—which force themselves on us without any thought of our own, and which spring up beneath the field of consciousness and cannot be adequately jus- lified in that field, but must be assumed as justifying themselves. For example, take the case of parental love ; so far as it is an in- stinct at all, it is due to no education, or meditation, or will, or habit, but asserts its own force over the mind; it springs into existence beneath the field of consciousness, and if asked to justify itself to another who has not experienced it, it can do so only by asserting imperatively its own overpowering vitality. Here, then, we have the type of a true instinct : but the thinking world has not generally perceived that the whole basis of our intellectual life, as well as our moral, emotional, and active, rests upon such instincts, and that this fact has a great bearing upon the theory of instinct which Mr. Darwin recently brought so ably before the world in his theory of species. Let us take Sir G. Ramsay's four notes of intellectual instinct :

"The characteristics of instinctive knowledge may more methodically be summed up thus:

"First.—It must be original, not derived from previous knowledge. From this it follows as a corollary, that it is got without effort, whether we will or not ; without seeking, without meditation ; that it neither demands nor admits of logical proof.

"Secondly.—It must be universal, held by all men without exception ; even by those who profess to doubt it.

" must be irresistible, proof against all sceptical arguments, though unanswerable.

"Fourthly.—It must not be self-evident, like the axioms of mathe- matics; in other words it must not be discerned to be true. The corollary from this is, that the denial of instinctive truth, however perverse, is still admissible; for such denial is, strictly speaking, not absurd, that is, not directly opposed to reason.

"These four characteristics, with their corollaries, sufficiently determine what is instinctive knowledge."

Now we have a remark to make on this fourth criterion of instinctive knowledge. It is true to say that instinctive knowledge must not, properly speaking, be self-evident; must not, while it remains instinc- tive, be discerned to be true, but it is a great mistake to say that any knowledge, which is knowledge at all, can in no case be discerned to be true. Sir J. Ramsay says that a man's knowledge of his personal identity differs from his knowledge that "lines equal to the same line are equal to one another," in that the one is not discerned to be true, and the other is. We say, on the contrary, that there are stages in every man's life when neither the one nor the other are discerned to be true, though they are implicitly assumed to be true,—though they regsdate all the actions and the life, as instinctive knowledge. Again there comes a time when both the one and the other truth are discerned —the one as truly discerned as the other,—the personal truth as cer- tainly as the mathematical truth. The lower animals assume, and act upon the assumption of, their personal identity as habitually as man ; otherwise a dog beaten once would not be disposed to refrain from the act which brought him the beating; the assumption of personal identity is as clearly there wherever there is memory, as in the man, but the dog does not think about it and discern it,—he does not bring it within the discriminating power of his reason. The child is, in its

• Instinct and Reason on the Find Principles of Human Knowledge. By Sir George Ramsay, Ban. Walton and lisherly.

infancy, in just the same position,—it assumes for all practical pur- poses, but never discerns, its personal identity. But that it is a truth as capable of intellectual discernment as mathematical axioms them- selves seems to us perfectly clear.

But Sir G. Ramsay would have been right in saying that the ma- jority of instinctive truths are not, like the particular class of mathematical truths, capable of being made evident to others, and is quite right in saying that their denial is not intrinsically self-contra- dictory. But this is st cross division which distinguishes the in- stinctive truths founded, in each case, on individual experience from those founded on external facts accessible to all alike. I can never make evident to another my grounds for believing in my own personal identity; and if another man had last all sense of his own personal identity, if he forgot one moment the sett of the previous moment and looked upon himself as a different man, I could assert that he was not sane but not that he was self-contradictory.. The fact on which intellectual instincts usually rest is a fact of individual experience alone, where no one else's experience can invalidate yours. A mother without maternal instincts could as easily be made to appear logically incoherent—which of course would be impossible—as a man without the instinct (and perception founded on the instinct) of his personal identity. He would be a man with a craze, no doubt, because this sense of personal identity runs through everything; but if he cannot identify himself, no one can do it for hum. The fact, therefore, on which the knowledge derived from intellectual instincts usually rests is a personal fact, accessible to no mind but one. The facts on which mathematical knowledge rests are external and objective facts open to all the world. In the former case, therefore, both the basis of fact and the perceiving power lie in the individual mind; in the latter only the perceiving power, the basis of fact being patent to All the world.

If now, Sir G. Ramsay wishes to deny the name of instinct to the latent and regulative general/ones of the mind, and to keep it for the latent and regulative individtudfacts of the mind, we have no objec- tion; only we say, do not deny that these truths are as capable as any others of clear discernment, and only incapable of being made evident by one to another, because the fact which makes it evident to my mind is not that which makes it evident to yours. It is a similar fact, but not the same.

This being premised, we must add that Sir G. Ramsay's list of in- tellectual instincts is very defective. He enumerates "personal identity," "knowledge of matter"—he should -rather say, know- ledge of something distinct from mind"—" knowledge of uniformity in nature," "knowledge of our own free will," " klief in human testimony." But one of the clearest cases of an intellectual instinct

left out, in the classifying instinct, which is as strong in the lower animals as in man. When the slave-making ant avoids the pages of the little yellow ant, or uses them only for food, knowing that they will not make good slaves, while it seizes with the greatest eagerness the pupa of the red ant, to train itself up new slaves—is not the classifying instinct as distinctly developed as in man himself!' That repeated perceptions of different individuals of the same class tend to form in the mind a certain instinctive or working notion of a class, is a fact at the basis of our whole intellectual nature, without which we could scarcely be said to have an intellectual nature, and it is a fact common to us with the lower animals.

Again, Sir G. Ramsay has omitted the interpretative instincts of man—by which we attribute (long before definite associations or ideas can have been formed) a certain meaning to the expressiQn of the human face and manner—to smiles and frowns, and the other symbols of thought and emotion. Probably the "instinct of belief in human testimony" is really to be classed as simpily one of the tendencies to ascribe a definite meaning to the moral expressions of men, whether those expressions be conveyed through the eye and ear, or in any other way. This is one of the highest class of our intellectual instincts, anti also one which scarcely ever passes at all, during our human life, into the region of really intellectual discernment.

On the whole, though, Sir G. Ramsay's little book hasinterest and acuteness; it would have been better if he had left Logic to others,. and expanded the portion on intellectual instincts into a dissertation which is much needed.

The subject needs the more notice, because the dismission of the origin of instinct raised by Mr. Darwin was exceedingly embarrassed by the restriction to active instincts, which have a direct tendency to preserve and advantage the race of the beings which possess them. The theory of "natural selection" was—that creatures accidentally, and perhaps abnormally gifted with a special advantage in organization, often transmit that advantage, and that so soon as a species thus springs up of which it is a permanent and marked feature, the advan- tage they possess tends to prolong and multiply their class rather than that of the competing and inferior species, which become the prey of natural enemies, while the gifted species survives and in- creases. The knotty point of the problem was, how far the opera- tion of this cause might be supposed to extend. Could it in any way account for the first birth of species—for the origin of instinct as well as its modification? We think the intellectual instincts would have something to say on this head. Could the classifying instinct, for instance, originate in the miud of an accidentally gifted ant, which for the first time should begin to recognize as a class the red ants, and as a distinct class the white ants ? Is it not clear that in these intellectual instincts we have a starting-point which, though no doubt capable of indefinite improvement, cannot be supposed to originate in elements other than mental ?