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Darwin on Instinct.

Never before, we suppose, has a single paper embodying the results of so many years of laborious research been read to the Linnean Society as Mr. Charles Darwin's posthumous essay upon "Instinct," which was heard for the first time last night. Not so many years ago, there was "scientifically" supposed to be an abyss of difference between instinct and reason. But, as our knowledge of the lower animals increased, so the supposed difference between instinct and intelligence seemed to disappear, until at last the only distinction between the two was understood to be that instinct belonged to the lower animals, and divine reason to man alone. Many actions which, when performed by man, were obviously the result of reason, when achieved by the lower animals could only, by the hard-and-fast-rule thus adopted, be performed by instinct. It was reserved for Darwin to trace, in his "Origin of Species," to the entire satisfaction of many thousands of deep thinkers in this and other countries, how every human feature and quality had been evolved gradually and by successive developments from lower forms of human life; how nothing was of divinely human but only of humanly ape-like origin. The greatest of human gifts is reason, and it was therefore necessary to trace human reason to its source in the animal world. Hence the essay on "Instinct" read last night. Mr. Darwin, taking the most complex instincts of the lower creatures, such as that of bee in hive-making, where it is impossible to say that actual reasoning powers are not employed traced them in many cases successfully through the important instincts of other bees and wasps, back by slow degrees to such bees as have no hive-making instincts at all. These successive steps showed how, according to Mr. Darwin's theory, the perfect instinct of the bee, equal in some respects to human reason, had been evolved from nothing. Ergo, argues Mr. Darwin, human reason, traced backwards through the instincts of half-reasoning savages and unreasoning apes, may also find its source in rudimentary instincts, and –finally –in nothing.