again, action, or pleasure supposed as coming from the action.

"Geistes-mechanismus

comes as near to

"disposition of mind," or, more shortly, "disposition," as so unsatisfactory a word can come to anything. Yet, if we translate it throughout by "disposition," we shall see how little we are being told.

We find on page 177 that "all instinctive actions give us an impression of absolute security and infallibility;" that "the will is never weak or hesitating, as it is when inferences are being drawn consciously." "We never,” Von Hartmann continues, "find instinct making mistakes." Passing over the fact that instinct is again personified, the statement is still incorrect. Instinctive actions are certainly, as a general rule, performed with less uncertainty than deliberative ones; this is explicable by the fact that they have been more often practised, and thus reduced more completely to a matter of routine; but nothing is more certain than that animals acting under the guidance of inherited experience or instinct frequently make mistakes which with further practice they correct. Von

Hartmann has abundantly admitted that the manner of an instinctive action is often varied in correspondence with variation in external circumstances. It is impossible to see how this does not involve both possibility of error and the connection of instinct with deliberation at one and the same time. The fact is simply this -when an animal finds itself in a like position with that in which it has already often done a certain thing in the persons of its forefathers, it will do this thing well and easily: when it finds the position somewhat, but not unrecognisably, altered through change either in its own person or in the circumstances exterior to it, it will vary its action with greater or less ease according to the nature of the change in the position: when the position is gravely altered the animal either bungles or is completely thwarted.

Not only does Von Hartmann suppose that instinct may, and does, involve knowledge antecedent to, and independent of, experience -an idea as contrary to the tendency of modern thought as that of spontaneous generation, with which indeed it is identical though presented in another shape-but he implies by his frequent use of the word "unmittelbar" that a result can

come about without any cause whatever. So he says, "Um für die unbewusster Erkenntniss, welche nicht durch sinnliche Wahrnehmung erworben, sondern als unmittelbar Besitz," &c.1 Because he does not see where the experience can have been gained, he cuts the knot, and denies that there has been experience. We say, Look more attentively and you will discover the time and manner in which the experience was gained.

Again, he continually assumes that animals. low down in the scale of life cannot know their own business because they show no sign of knowing ours. See his remarks on Saturnia pavonia minor (page 165), and elsewhere on cattle and gadflies. The question is not what can they know, but what does their action prove to us that they do know. With each species of animal or plant there is one profession only, and it is hereditary. With us there are many professions, and they are not hereditary; so that they cannot become instinctive, as they would otherwise tend to do.

2

He attempts to draw a distinction between the causes that have produced the weapons 1 See page 178 of this volume. Page 160 of this vol.

and working instruments of animals, on the one hand, and those that lead to the formation of hexagonal cells by bees, &c., on the other. No such distinction can be justly drawn.

The ghost-stories which Von Hartmann accepts will hardly be accepted by people of sound judgment. There is one well-marked distinctive feature between the knowledge manifested by animals when acting instinctively and the supposed knowledge of seers and clairvoyants. In the first case, the animal never exhibits knowledge except upon matters concerning which its race has been conversant for generations; in the second, the seer is supposed to do so. In the first case, a new feature is invariably attended with disturbance of the performance and the awakening of consciousness and deliberation, unless the new matter is too small in proportion to the remaining features of the case to attract attention, or unless, though really new, it appears so similar to an old feature as to be at first mistaken for it; with the second, it is not even professed that the seer's ancestors have had long experience upon the matter concerning which the seer is supposed to have special insight, and I

can imagine no more powerful a priori argument against a belief in such stories.

Close upon the end of his chapter Von Hartmann touches upon the one matter which requires consideration. He refers the similarity of instinct that is observable among all species to the fact that like causes produce like effects; and I gather, though he does not expressly say so, that he considers similarity of instinct in successive generations to be referable to the same cause as similarity of instinct between all the contemporary members of a species. He thus raises the one objection against referring the phenomena of heredity to memory which I think need be gone into with any fulness. I will, however, reserve this matter for my concluding chapters.

Von Hartmann concludes his chapter with a quotation from Schelling, to the effect that the phenomena of animal instinct are the true touchstone of a durable philosophy; by which I suppose it is intended to say that if a system or theory deals satisfactorily with animal instinct, it will stand, but not otherwise. I can wish nothing better than that the philosophy of the unconscious advanced by Von Hartmann be tested by this standard.

P