t.

All animals of a given species are wise in their own way, but not in
the way of another species. The robin could not build the oriole's
nest, nor the oriole build the robin's nor the swallow's. The cunning
of the fox is not the cunning of the coon. The squirrel knows a good
deal more about nuts than the rabbit does, but the rabbit would live
where the squirrel would die. The muskrat and the beaver build lodges
much alike, that is, with the entrance under water and an inner
chamber above the water, and this because they are both water-animals
with necessities much the same.

Now, the mark of reason is that it is endlessly adaptive, that it can
apply itself to all kinds of problems, that it can adapt old means to
new ends, or new means to old ends, and is capable of progressive
development. It holds what it gets, and uses that as a fulcrum to get
more. But this is not at all the way of animal instinct, which begins
and ends as instinct and is non-progressive.

A large part of our own lives is instinctive and void of thought. We
go instinctively toward the warmth and away from the cold. All our
affections are instinctive, and do not wait upon the reason. Our
affinities are as independent of our reflection as gravity is. Our
inherited traits, the ties of race, the spirit of the times in which
we live, the impressions of youth, of climate, of soil, of our
surroundings,--all influence our acts and often determine them without
any conscious exercise of judgment or reason on our part. Then habit
is all-potent with us, temperament is potent, health and disease are
potent. Indeed, the amount of conscious reason that an ordinary man
uses in his life, compared with the great unreason or blind impulse
and inborn tendency that impel him, is like his artificial lights,
compared with the light of day--indispensable on special occasions,
but a feeble matter, after all. Reason is an artificial light in the
sense that it is not one with the light of nature, and in the sense
that men possess it in varying degrees. The lower animals have only a
gleam of it now and then. They are wise as the plants and trees are
wise, and are guided by their inborn tendencies.

Is instinct resourceful? Can it meet new conditions? Can it solve a
new problem? If so, how does it differ from free intelligence or
judgment? I am inclined to think that up to a certain point instinct
is resourceful. Thus a Western correspondent writes: "At three
different t