But I could show that none of these characters of instinct are
universal. A little dose, as Pierre Huber expresses it, of judgment or
reason, often comes into play, even in animals very low in the scale
of nature.
Frederick Cuvier and several of the older metaphysicians have compared
instinct with habit. This comparison gives, I think, a remarkably
accurate notion of the frame of mind under which an instinctive action
is performed, but not of its origin. How unconsciously many habitual
actions are performed, indeed not rarely in direct opposition to our
conscious will! yet they may be modified by the will or reason. Habits
easily become associated with other habits, and with certain periods
of time and states of the body. When once acquired, they often remain
constant throughout life. Several 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 hammock completed up only to
the third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed the fourth,
fifth, and sixth stages of construction.
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