is at this point that instinct comes to the rescue. The race has not given the child
a mind ready made—that must develop; but it has given him a ready-made
nervous system, ready to respond with the proper movements when it receives
the touch of its environment through the senses.
And this nervous system has been so trained during a limitless past that its
responses are the ones which are necessary for the welfare of its owner. It can do
a hundred things without having to wait to learn them. Burdette says of the new-
born child, "Nobody told him what to do. Nobody taught him. He knew. Placed
suddenly on the guest list of this old caravansary, he knew his way at once to
two places in it—his bedroom and the dining-room." A thousand generations of
babies had done the same thing in the same way, and each had made it a little
easier for this particular baby to do his part without learning how.
Definition of Instinct.—Instincts are the tendency to act in certain definite
ways, without previous education and without a conscious end in view. They are
a tendency to act; for some movement, or motor adjustment, is the response to
an instinct. They do not require previous education, for none is possible with
many instinctive acts: the duck does not have to be taught to swim or the baby to
suck. They have no conscious end in view, though the result may be highly
desirable.
Says James: "The cat runs after the mouse, runs or shows fight before the dog,
avoids falling from walls and trees, shuns fire and water, etc., not because he has
any notion either of life or death, or of self, or of preservation. He has probably
attained to no one of these conceptions in such a way as to react definitely upon
it. He acts in each case separately, and simply because he cannot help it; being
so framed that when that particular running thing called a mouse appears in his
field of vision he must pursue; that when that particular barking and obstreperous
thing called a dog appears he must retire, if at a distance, and scratch if close by;
that he must withdraw his feet from water and his face from flame, etc. His
nervous system is to a great extent a pre-organized bundle of such reactions.
They are as fatal as sneezing, and exactly correlated to their special excitants as
it to its own."[6]
You ask, Why does the lark rise on the flash of a sunbeam from his meadow to
the morning sky, leaving a trail of melody to mark his flight? Why does the
beaver build his dam, and the oriole hang her nest? Why are myriads of animal
forms on the earth today doing what they were countless generations ago? Why
does the lover seek the maid, and the mother cherish her young? Because the