Instinct

INSTINCT. – It is a tendency, an inner impulse, which determines and directs a complex of external, spontaneous, and coordinated acts, by means of which the animal satisfies the needs of its relational life. There are at least as many instincts as there are different needs of the animal, and they may concern either a particular object (the fox that goes in search of the hare) or a particular action (the bird that builds its nest). They pursue a twofold aim: the preservation of the individual, so that it seeks food (the spider, the larva of the ant-lion), or stores it for the future (the spi, ants), or defends itself from enemies (various forms of nest, colour mimicry, feigned death, self-mutilation, migrations); and the preservation of the species (the choice of safe places, the provision of different foods for the offspring, training).

1. CHARACTERISTICS OF INSTINCT

The empirical characteristics of instinct may be reduced to the following: 1) Adaptability to the particular ends to be achieved. In this respect the animal world, especially that of insects, displays wonders; nothing is more ingenious than the behaviour of the beaver in constructing dams; of the bee in arranging and forming the hexagonal cells, solving the geometrical and economic problem of making them contain the maximum amount of honey with the minimum expenditure of wax; of the leaf-rolling weevil, which cuts the birch leaf according to a formula of differential mathematics discovered only recently; of the ammophila, a vegetarian insect, which procures for its carnivorous larva a living but immobilized butterfly caterpillar, first paralyzing it by stinging its nerve centres. 2) Blindness, in the sense that the animal does not know, under the aspect of an end, the end which it nevertheless reaches so wonderfully through its action, nor the proportion which the means it employs bear to that end. It knows the movements it performs, which are in fact so many means ordered to its own good or that of the species, but it does not perceive the end as such, nor the means as such. This is shown by the fact that, when circumstances change or its work is disturbed, it continues to perform acts without realizing that they have become useless (the spider, for example, which carries and energetically defends its cocoon continues to drag and defend a cork pellet substituted for the cocoon; birds feed their nestlings for a certain period, then abandon them, even if, because of lack of food, they see them dying of hunger). 3) Specificity. Instincts are characteristic of the species. Each species of spider weaves the same type of web; each species of bird makes the same type of nest, so that the species of the bird can readily be guessed from the characteristics of the nest. At times there are characteristic acts within the same species: for example, the instinctive acts of the queen bee differ from those of the drones, which in turn do not possess the instinct to produce honey and wax. 4) Preformation, in the sense that instinct is innate, spontaneous, and natural, not learned through experience; the larva of the ant-lion performs its work perfectly as soon as it emerges from the egg, without any prior training by its parents, who are no longer present; the duckling, hatched by a hen, immediately runs to the water and plunges into it to swim, despite the cries of the frightened mother hen; the squirrel stores hazelnuts for its first winter, which it does not know, just as it will do for subsequent winters. Here, however, a distinction must be made between primary and secondary instincts. Primary instincts are those that are immediately perfect and incapable of further perfection (for example, pecking in chicks and suckling in mammals); secondary instincts are those that are less indispensable and can be perfected through practice and experience (for example, birds learn to sing, dogs to seize prey in one way or another; during migrations, the older individuals direct the flight; all animals learn to fear the hunting rifle; many species of fish no longer bite the hook after one of them has been caught on it). In general, it is also observed that the more highly developed the psyche is—which is the case the higher one ascends in the scale of species—the more the automatic efficacy of instinct diminishes. This fact also makes possible the training and domestication of higher animals, which, through psychophysiological habits, lend themselves to developing new tendencies and abilities within themselves. 5) Immutability: that is, instincts always manifest themselves through the same activities (the bees of today work exactly as they did in the time of Virgil, who sang of them in the Georgics; old individuals know no more than the young. Nevertheless, a certain degree of plasticity must also be admitted, a flexibility in response to the diversity of environmental circumstances (for example, the golden oriole now uses, to build its nest, threads woven by human hands; or it is certain that the art of weaving is not as ancient as humanity; the spider adapts its web to the diversity of the points of support on which the individual webs are constructed). 6) Coordination, in the sense that instinctive acts, often extremely complicated and ingenious and requiring time, are not performed at random, but appear to be governed and directed in accordance with the end to be attained, and do not cease until that end has been achieved. They therefore possess a finality toward which they converge, despite their most complex diversity. 7) Correlation with development and with particular situations of the organism. Thus the instinct of self-preservation in insects undergoing metamorphosis produces different behaviours according as the insect is in the state of caterpillar, chrysalis, or fully developed adult; the sexual instinct manifests itself after maturation and disappears after the involution of the reproductive organs; worker bees pass from the behaviour of nurses of the small larvae, which in the first days of life remain sedentary in their cell, to that of wax producers, when the glands secreting the nutritive liquid undergo involution and the wax glands develop strongly, and finally to that of honey gatherers, when the combs have been formed; likewise, a deficiency in necessary substances in the food, or indigestion, arouses the search for particular other foods that are not sought outside those circumstances.

II. NATURE OF I

From consideration of the characteristics mentioned above, various conceptions arose concerning the nature of i.: 1) Mechanistic theory. Descartes, the mechanistic philosophers, and the defenders of the theory of “tropisms” (J. Loëb, M. Verworn, etc.), who admit no third datum between matter and spirit, namely, life, reduce i. to the physiological reflexes alone aroused by it and the animal to a mere automaton. This plainly contradicts experience. The spider that repairs its web, torn by a gust of wind, and the insect that remedies an accident occurring while it is constructing its little cell, demonstrate that circumstances can, to a certain extent, determine the insertion into the series of instinctive acts of a new act, accidentally rendered necessary in order to continue and complete the instinctive cycle. Moreover, the modifications that, according to circumstances, the golden oriole can make to its nest and the partridge to its shelter demonstrate

a certain plasticity in i. But if the sequence of acts is purely mechanical, it can neither be interrupted, nor completed, nor modified. I. presupposes reflexes, whether simple or associated, but is not confused with them; rather, it directs them toward their goal. 2) Anthropomorphic theory. Other philosophers, on the contrary, and several naturalists, struck by the marvels of instinctive activity, would attribute to animals an intelligence like the human, even if of a lower degree, even if rudimentary. Experience, however, teaches that i. does not require intellectual cognition, which would no longer explain the uniformity and constancy of instinctive actions (v. further on, V). 3) Mystical theory. It sees in i. a mysterious intelligence, having nothing to do with human intelligence, but rather constituting a kind of intuitionism; thus, for example, it is said that animals foresee the weather and cataclysms and run to seek shelter; they eat because they intuit that otherwise they would die of starvation. These facts, however, have an entirely different interpretation; animals have no intuition of the weather, but are so constituted that certain particular sensations produce reflexes preparing them for changes in the weather; likewise, they eat because the sensation of hunger arouses those reflexes that impel them to seek food. 4) Psychological theory. Instinctive conduct, as revealed by the typical forms indicated above, “is an activity bearing the imprint not only of a causal connection between its various manifestations and between these and the structures of the organism, but also of a direction toward an end and of an objective experience. It presents itself to us clearly as a whole, as an organized unity directed toward an end which, while it is unfolding, is not yet in act and, once attained, will mark its conclusion.” And even in the subject performing the action, one must suppose “an inner, assured, and unconscious activity that organizes in a determinate direction the raw data, receptive and effector, of the organism, so as to connect them into a whole unfolding successively in time and space. It is therefore direction, or rather ‘sense,’ that is the fundamental and characteristic note of i.; it must consequently be considered a psychological activity” (A. Gemelli-G. Zunini [V. BIBLICA.], p. 340). This inner activity, which provokes the external activity and the movements and actions necessary for the end, belongs, according to s. Tommaso and scholastic philosophy, to a particular faculty possessed by the animal, enabling it to discern what is beneficial or harmful to it; this faculty is called “estimative” (s. Tommaso, De veritate, q. 18, a. 7, ad 7; De anima, lib. III, lect. 5°).

III. FUNCTIONING OF I

I. is conditioned by a twofold factor: a) the natural predisposition of the animal’s organism (physiological aspect); b) perception, which may be either an internal organic sensation or a perception, accompanied by the corresponding representation, of an external object, e.g., the sight of a puddle, a cry, a song, a smell, etc. (psychological aspect). Thus, by virtue of the animal’s natural predisposition, certain objects evoke in it particular representations and sensations, which set the instinctive tendency in motion; the animal then acts under the impulse of these sensations and of the representations accompanying them. These naturally vary as the circumstances actually present vary, and therefore cause the instinctive act to vary, adapting it to them. For example, in order to pounce on a mouse, the cat does not always make the same leap, but proportionates it to the distance and to the prey’s immobility or movement; the weasel, when it fails to immobilize its victim with the first bite, repeats II. This explains the sagacity observed in the actions of animals, which consists in an appreciation of the object’s forms, of spatial relations, and of movements to be made, omitted, or repeated.

IV. ORIGIN OF I

According to the various ways of conceiving the nature of i., various theories have been devised concerning its origin, which may be grouped as follows: 1) Theory of adaptation: i. would derive from the animal’s need to adapt itself to external conditions; a kind of struggle for life under the alternative of adapting or dying (J. B. Lamarck, C. Darwin, H. Spencer, etc.). This cannot be so, because animals (the bee that makes the cells, the sheep that flees the wolf) would have perished before being able to adapt themselves.

2) Theory of individual habit: i. is caused by the acquired habit of always acting in that particular way, either through one’s own experience, or through imitation, or through education (S. Condillac, R. Russel-Wallace, etc.). To this it may be objected that i. already exists from the very first instinctive operation (the bird builds its first nest with the same ease and perfection as its subsequent nests; the sheep flees the wolf from the first time it sees it). If i. were the fruit of education, the first time it would not act as perfectly as the second, the third, etc., unless one were to attribute to animals, which perform such complex and marvelous instinctive acts, a capacity for learning that enables them to succeed immediately where man would have to spend much more time; imitation, moreover, cannot take place at least in those cases in which, for example, insects do not even have the opportunity to see their parents, which die before the larva emerges from the egg. This does not exclude the fact that acquired automatisms may become incorporated into an instinctive act, thereby complicating its interpretation.

3) Theory of hereditary habit: i. would be transmitted by parents to their offspring (as, in general, the evolutionists hold). But in that case it would not be explained from whom the ancestors of that particular species could have inherited the i. transmitted to them; moreover, even if some i. can perhaps be inherited, heredity explains nothing about many of them: for example, the queen and the drones of bees do not work, but reproduce; the worker bees, on the other hand, generated by them, work with marvelous skill and do not reproduce.

4) Theory of perception: i. would be produced by the perception of external objects. But it must be observed that perception is a necessary factor for setting i. in motion, and therefore does not create it but presupposes it; furthermore, the external senses do not perceive the reason for usefulness. Otherwise, why does the bird gather straw for its nest only at certain times of the year and not on the other days, when it also sees the same straw of the same color? Why does the sparrow choose straw for building its nest, and the swallow mud?

The origin of i., like that of intelligence and will, calls for the solution of the problem of the nature of life and its finality; it therefore cannot stop at experimental science alone, but must ascend to metaphysics, which deals precisely with the origin of living beings and the faculties with which they were endowed by their supreme Author in accordance with the ends assigned to each species of them.
V. L'

I. NON È INTELLIGENZA

That animals possess intelligence is already an ancient opinion, affirmed, at least implicitly, by the proponents of the transmigration of human souls into beasts; and it was upheld, also in later times, by H. Rorarius and M. Montaigne; in more recent times by the advocates of the so-called “popular psychology” (A. Brehm, G. J. Romanes), following in the footsteps of C. Darwin, and then by those evolutionary naturalists who classify the actions of animals into two orders: those performed in a manner conforming to an end, but prior to all experience, would belong to instinct, which would act mechanically; whereas those performed by virtue of their own experience would belong to intelligence, which would differ from human intelligence only in degree.

Philosophy, however, and the more careful study of the phenomena offered by experience, conducted by distinguished naturalists (e.g., J. H. Fabre, G. Surbled, L. T. Hobhouse, J. B. Watson, J.-A. Plateau, W. Wagner, E. Claparède, J. Lubbock, W. Wundt, E. L. Thorndike, A. J. Kinnaman, etc.), assert with certainty that the operations of brutes do not proceed from intelligence, because they provide no sign that proves its presence or necessity; indeed, they provide signs that they do not possess it at all. Intelligence is understood as the faculty of forming and understanding abstract, universal concepts; of knowing the relations existing between effect and cause, between means and end; of formulating judgments and reasonings, and not merely of associating different representations; and finally, of reflecting upon one’s own actions with a view to continual adaptation and improvement.

Now intelligence, precisely because its operations are directed by abstract and universal concepts, is not limited to a single kind of operation; for example, one who is guided by the abstract idea of “house” is not limited, in building it, to a single material (e.g., wood), nor to a single type; hence the possibility that the same architect may construct buildings in the most varied styles. In animals, by contrast, individual species and sometimes even individual subspecies have only one kind of operation, and all the individuals belonging to them carry it out in the same way; instinctive acts are uniform and constant.

Moreover, among the endowments of intelligence are language, progress, the notion of a God and of a moral law, and the tendency toward supersensible goods—all endowments that are not found in animals. For animals: 1) do not possess the true faculty of language, which presupposes knowledge of the external signs (word or gesture) that are employed, nor of the relations existing between word and word, gesture and gesture, nor of the purpose for which one speaks and gestures and seeks to communicate one’s ideas and knowledge to others. They do, indeed, have the appearance of language (cries, whines, hisses, whistles, etc.), but this is nothing other than an externalization of their inner appetites and affections, which in turn arouse in other animals similar appetites or affections, or tendencies to imitation, or associations suited to make them act in this or that way, in this or that direction. The hen, for example, warns of danger with certain cries; at those cries the chicks run for shelter beneath her wings; similarly, the sentinels of gulls, partridges, lapwings, and marmots utter a cry when danger approaches. That cry manifests the passion, the affection aroused in the hen or sentinel by the danger. It will also have the effect of putting the chicks or companions on their guard; but in itself the cry is nothing but a purely psychological phenomenon; the chicks’ running away is a psychological phenomenon, a manifestation of the affection produced in them by that particular cry of the hen. In other words, it is one thing for nature to direct the hen’s cry toward the safety of the chicks, and quite another for the hen, by means of that cry, to intend to give a warning and call the chicks, as a mother would do with her children. «Etsi bruta animalia aliquid manifestant non tamen manifestationem intendunt; sed naturali instinctu aliquid agunt ad quod manifestatio sequitur» (Summ. theol., 2ᵃ-2ᵃᵉ, q. 110, a. 1). Thus all those expressions of brutes that we perceive as being directed toward others, as signals, are explained. In fact, they serve as signals, but the brute does not perceive them as such and does not use them with the aim of warning others; the directedness is merely affective and material, not intellectual and formal. The same should be said of the supposed language of bees and ants that attract their companions to places where they have found an abundance of honey, sugar, or grain. The fact can be explained by the nuzzlings, mouth-to-mouth contacts, or touches provoked, on the one hand, by the satisfaction of having found something good and, on the other, by the perception that these gestures arouse the instinctive action of rushing to the fortunate spot. It cannot therefore be asserted either that brutes speak or, still less, that they understand one another. For them to understand one another, there would have to be an agreement concerning the meaning of that cry or that particular movement. But no such agreement intervenes, for example, the first time the chick hears the hen’s alarm, or the kitten sees the dog. 2) Brutes, moreover, are capable only of those forms of progress that derive from the association of images and from memory; in fact, they do not modify their way of acting except by virtue of precisely these organic and sensory faculties. Whereas human beings display manifold variations and progress in the sciences and the arts, among brutes there can be only variations in practical, accidental procedures, within the circle of variations of an organ fixed in its specific structure; in its actions it can never free itself from the style and measure imposed by nature upon its appetite, its imagination, and its very inventiveness. 3) Brutes, as daily experience attests, manifest no sign of a tendency toward supersensible things, nor any sign of religion or of a moral law. Otherwise they would not be seen continually indulging their appetites, abandoning or killing sick individuals, as is regularly observed in many species, nor, as in others, would the female always devour the male after the reproductive act.

It is true that at times one observes in brutes actions that might be said to possess a moral character, such as obedience, gratitude, repentance, love toward their master, even to the point of exposing themselves to the danger of death for him or dying upon his grave; but these actions have only an apparent resemblance to acts of genuine virtue; in reality they proceed solely from sensory affection, from the recollection of past facts and circumstances—for example, from love, from the memory of past pleasures, from fear, etc.

To regard many animal behaviors as forms, even if primitive, of intelligence also conflicts with what morphology and the physiology of the brain teach. It has now been clearly demonstrated that the higher psychic functions—including the anticipation and foreknowledge of the future, acts of will, etc.—are connected in human beings with the presence of definite cortical regions of the cerebral hemispheres, located chiefly in the frontal lobes and the prefrontal cortex. These cortical regions are absent in all animals, even in those, such as the anthropoid apes, that are morphologically most similar to human beings. It is well known that the destruction of these centers in human beings leads to the loss of all intellectual acts; consequently, intelligence cannot be attributed to beasts, which normally lack these centers.

To complete the argument, one may mention several famous animals that were presented as examples of intelligent brutes: the Berlin horse Hans, the Elberfeld horses, the Mannheim dog, the monkeys Maia of Vienna and Basso of Frankfurt, etc. By striking with their hooves, moving tablets bearing the letters of the alphabet or numbers, and so forth, they appeared to demonstrate that they could read, understand a language, distinguish people by name, and perform very difficult mathematical operations. But a careful examination of the circumstances also showed that these were merely automatisms, directed by movements or signals from persons present, and especially by those who had trained them. When the circumstances were changed, in fact, the apparently intelligent actions ceased or were carried out randomly, with continual errors (cf. on this subject: A. Gemelli, Bestie che pensano e fanno i conti... e uomini che non ragionano, in Religione e scienza, Milan 1920, pp. 51–108; id., L'intelligenza delle scimmie, in Scienza ed apologetica, there 1920, pp. 301–33; E. Claparède, Les chevaux pensants d'Elberfeld, in Arch. de psychologie, 12 [1912], p. 263 ff.; 13 [1913], p. 244 ff.; id. and J. Largnier, A propos du chien de Mannheim, ibid., pp. 312–98).

With regard to this entire question of the marvellous actions of brutes, which seem to presuppose the presence of an intellectual faculty, one must bear in mind: that the facts must be carefully examined in order to distinguish the pure truth from the anthropomorphic interpretations with which they are presented and embellished; that the fact must not be unique, so as to exclude purely fortuitous events; and that an explanation must first be sought in the sensitive faculties, i.e., memory, etc. By following these rules carefully, it will increasingly be observed that instinct is never intelligence.

VI. INSTINCT IN MAN

In man too, since he is an animal, there are instincts, and they manifest themselves from earliest infancy. One observes, in fact, in the child the instinct to suck, swallow, move about, and walk; the gregarious instinct, that is, the impulse to want to remain in the company of others; the instinct of fear at a sudden sound or at the appearance of an unknown person; the instinct to turn to his mother and rest quietly in her arms. He expresses his states of mind through crying, shrieks, clamour, smiles, and caresses. Yet man, endowed with intelligence, easily exercises a kind of “censorship” over his instincts, and gradually subjects them to the dominion of reason and will, so that they gradually lose their character of “animality” inclination (v.). Hence it is customary to say that man has less instinctuality than animals and more instinctive inclinations. This is why man’s instincts appear in their fullness, and often also in anomalous forms, in individuals whose use of intelligence is impeded, for example, in the imbecile and the cretin; whereas in the normal child they appear in their natural purity.

VII. THE LAWS OF INSTINCTS

Instincts are subject to certain laws that have important consequences in the field of pedagogy. 1) Law of transience: many instincts, present and operative in the first years of life, cease later, simply as a result of the organism’s development; thus, for example, after a certain number of days, chicks no longer feel impelled to shelter beneath the wings of the hen, which warns them of danger. 2) Law of specialization: every instinct that has once found its complete satisfaction in a particular object remains disposed to take pleasure in it exclusively and consequently to lose its spontaneous impulse toward other objects of the same kind; hence the exclusive attachment to a place (the bird builds its nest again on the same branch), and “irrational” sympathies or antipathies toward particular persons or actions. In these cases, instinct tends to become a acquired inclination. 3) Law of confluence: if a particular object arouses two contradictory instincts, the development of one will consequently inhibit the other and leave it as though stillborn. For example, a chick experiences two contradictory impulses: to follow or to flee from a person. If from the first day it is accustomed to follow that person, it will no longer experience toward that person the instinct of fear, which usually arises on the fourth day. 4) Law of survival: if an instinct has been able to function during the period when its dynamism was at its greatest, it will acquire a habit that will continue to live and react even after the instinct has disappeared. Instincts exercised to the utmost in a given direction (e.g., the instinct for play or sport) produce a particular attachment to one game or amusement or another. 5) Law of inhibition: before the period of its transience, an instinct can be neutralized only by the development of the contrary instinct. Thus, fear of punishment can prevent the development of a certain number of undesirable instincts.

VIII. THE PEDAGOGY OF INSTINCTS

The laws mentioned above offer the educator some very important norms, whose repercussions extend throughout life: 1) instincts must be supervised and directed from the moment they first appear. Families must therefore keep children under their eyes for as long as possible; only in this way will they be able, by noticing bad tendencies, to remedy them, removing from them the objects that may serve as an impulse toward evil and offering good tendencies instead the objects that serve to develop them. Persons outside the family rarely perform this task well; and within the family itself, no one does it better than the mother, whose heart is richer in intuition and expansiveness. 2) The appearance of useful tendencies must be supervised in order to offer them continual opportunities for exercise, bringing to their maximum development those that will be most useful in the future. 3) Remove from the child everything that may represent a danger both for the present and for the future (e.g., the child’s combativeness should not always be excessively indulged with toy swords, bows, revolvers, and everything that suggests violent domination). 4) Danger must not be confused with pain. Nothing is more effective than associating pleasure and pain with the exercise of instincts, according as one wishes to encourage or repress them. The pain that derives from or follows the exercise of a harmful action has great inhibitory power. Certainly, the pre-eminent inhibitory power is the activity of the will, enlightened by the wise reasons set forth by the intellect; but even while remaining within the sensitive sphere, punishment and chastisement wonderfully support the weakness of the will. 5) Fear of risk and pain must not be exaggerated; otherwise inert, selfish, and uncomprehending persons will be formed, whereas nothing is more educational and formative than the lived experience of pain.

mann. Institut u. Intelligenz im Tierreich, 3rd ed., Freiburg i. Br. 1905 (Italian translation, Florence 1908); P. Hachet-Souplet, La genèse des instincts, Paris 1912; J. H. Fabre, Souvenirs entomologiques, 7th ed., 10 vols., Paris 1919-25, (Italian translation, Milan 1922-27); H. E. Ziegler, Der Begriffe des Instinktes einst u. jetzt, 3rd ed., Jena 1920; J. de la Vassière, Psychologie pédagogique. L'enfant, l'adolescent, le jeune homme, 5th ed., Paris 1926, pp. 217-20, with extensive bibliography, pp. 508-509, 510-11; M. Thomas, L'instinct. Thème, réalité, ibid. 1929; J. V. Uexküll-G. Kriszat, I mondi invisibili, Italian translation, Milan 1936; E. Janssens, L'instinct d'après W. Mac Dougall, Paris 1938; G. Zunini, I. e sviluppo, in Roc. di filos. neo-colostica, 30 (1938), pp. 319-33 (with extensive bibliography); P. Siwek, Psychologia metaphysica, Rome 1944, pp. 167-77, 228-36; E. Baudin, Corso di psicologia, Florence 1948, pp. 361-86; A. Gemelli-G. Zunini, Introduzione alla psicologia, 2nd ed., Milan 1949, pp. 319-68.

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