Page - 263 - in The Origin of Species

INSTINCT 263 which an instinctive action is performed, but not necessarily of its origin. How unconsciously many habitual actions are performed, indeed not rarely in direct opposition to our con- scious will ! yet they may be modified by the will or reason. Habits easily become associated with other habits, with cer- tain periods of time, and states of the body. When once acquired, they often remain constant throughout life. Sev- eral other points of resemblance between instincts and habits could be pointed out. As in repeating a well-known song, so in instincts, one action follows another by a sort of rhythm; if a person be interrupted in a song, or in repeating anything by rote, he is generally forced to go back to recover the habitual train of thought; so P. Huber found it was with a caterpillar, which makes a very complicated hammock; for if he took a caterpillar which had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth stage of construction, and put it into a ham- mock completed up only to the third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of construction. If, however, a caterpillar were taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its work was already done for it, far from deriving any bene- fit from this, it was much embarrassed, and in order to com- plete its hammock, seemed forced to start from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus tried to complete the already finished work. If we suppose any habitual action to become inherited—and it can be shown that this does sometimes happen—then the resemblance between what originally was a habit and an in- stinct becomes so close as not to be distinguished. If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with won- derfully litde practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly be said to have done so instinctively. But it would be a serious error to suppose that the greater num- ber of instincts have been acquired by habit in one genera- tion, and then transmitted by inheritance to succeeding gen- erations. It can be clearly shown that the most wonderful instincts with which we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and of many ants, could not oossibly have been ac- quired by habit.