Y.M. How are you going to make that out, when the lower animals
have no mental quality but instinct, while man possesses reason?
O.M. What is instinct?
Y.M. It is merely unthinking and mechanical exercise of
inherited habit.
O.M. What originated the habit?
Y.M. The first animal started it, its descendants have
inherited it.
O.M. How did the first one come to start it?
Y.M. I don’t know; but it didn’t THINK it out.
O.M. How do you know it didn’t?
Y.M. Well–I have a right to suppose it didn’t, anyway.
O.M. I don’t believe you have. What is thought?
Y.M. I know what you call it: the mechanical and automatic
putting together of impressions received from outside, and
drawing an inference from them.
O.M. Very good. Now my idea of the meaningless term “instinct” is,
that it is merely PETRIFIED THOUGHT; solidified and made inanimate
by habit; thought which was once alive and awake, but it become
unconscious–walks in its sleep, so to speak.
Y.M. Illustrate it.
O.M. Take a herd of cows, feeding in a pasture. Their
heads are all turned in one direction. They do that
instinctively; they gain nothing by it, they have no reason for
it, they don’t know why they do it. It is an inherited habit
which was originally thought–that is to say, observation of an
exterior fact, and a valuable inference drawn from that
observation and confirmed by experience. The original wild ox
noticed that with the wind in his favor he could smell his enemy
in time to escape; then he inferred that it was worth while to
keep his nose to the wind. That is the process which man calls
reasoning. Man’s thought-machine works just like the other
animals’, but it is a better one and more Edisonian. Man, in the
ox’s place, would go further, reason wider: he would face part
of the herd the other way and protect both front and rear.
Y.M. Did you stay the term instinct is meaningless?
O.M. I think it is a bastard word. I think it confuses us;
for as a rule it applies itself to habits and impulses which had
a far-off origin in thought, and now and then breaks the rule and
applies itself to habits which can hardly claim a thought-origin.
Y.M. Give an instance.
O.M. Well, in putting on trousers a man always inserts the same old
leg first–never the other one. There is no advantage in that,
and no sense in it. All men do it, yet no man thought it out
and adopted it of set purpose, I imagine. But it is a habit which
is transmitted, no doubt, and will continue to be transmitted.
Y.M. Can you prove that the habit exists?
O.M. You can prove it, if you doubt. If you will take a
man to a clothing-store and watch him try on a dozen pairs of
trousers, you will see.
Y.M. The cow illustration is not–
O.M. Sufficient to show that a dumb animal’s mental machine
is just the same as a man’s and its reasoning processes the same?
I will illustrate further. If you should hand Mr. Edison a box
which you caused to fly open by some concealed device he would
infer a spring, and would hunt for it and find it. Now an uncle
of mine had an old horse who used to get into the closed lot
where the corn-crib was and dishonestly take the corn. I got the
punishment myself, as it was supposed that I had heedlessly
failed to insert the wooden pin which kept the gate closed.
These persistent punishments fatigued me; they also caused me to
infer the existence of a culprit, somewhere; so I hid myself and
watched the gate. Presently the horse came and pulled the pin
out with his teeth and went in. Nobody taught him that; he had
observed–then thought it out for himself. His process did not
differ from Edison’s; he put this and that together and drew an
inference–and the peg, too; but I made him sweat for it.
Y.M. It has something of the seeming of thought about it.
Still it is not very elaborate. Enlarge.
O.M. Suppose Mr. Edison has been enjoying some one’s