ABSTRACT
WE tend to think, or, at any rate, to express our thought, in terms of antithetical contrast. A century ago Sydney Smith said 1 :—"The most common notion, now prevalent, with respect to animals is, that they are guided by instinct; that the discriminating circumstance between the minds of animals and of men is, that the former do what they do from instinct, the latter from reason." And he emphasizes the contrast when he says:—"When I call that principle upon which the bees or any other animals proceed to their labours, the principle of instinct, I only mean that it is not a principle of reason. However the knowledge is gained, it is not gained as our knowledge is gained. It is not gained by experience or imitation. ... It cannot be invention, or the adaptation of means to ends; because as the animal works before he knows what event is going to happen, he cannot know what the end is, to which he is accommodating the means: and if he be actuated by any other than these, the generation of ideas in animals is . . . very different from the generation of ideas in men" (p 247). "Ants and beavers," he tells us, "lay up magazines. Where do they get their knowledge that it will not be so easy to collect food in rainy weather as it is in the summer? Men and women know these things, because their grandpapas and grandmammas have told them so: ants, hatched from the egg artificially, or birds hatched in this manner, have all this knowledge by intuition, without the smallest communication with any of their relations" (p. 244).
