TRAGEDY OF INSTINCT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22831, 16 March 1936, Page 5

TRAGEDY OF INSTINCT

At one of the recent juvenile lecture* at the Royal Society of Arts many interesting things were said about instinct in animals, remarks The Times. Among the illustrations given was the happy case of the young spider. This gifted creature, just out of the egg, can accomplish that miracle of construction, a spider’s web, without any teaching and without hesitation. The thought must have occurred to many of the young hearers that the lot of the baby spider is much happier than their own. How simple aud easy life would he’ if only they too had been born fully equipped to do even the most difficult things. Something not unlike that juvenile day dream floats into the fancy of their elders from time to time. The man tired and disheartened by his running fight with himself and circumstances is tempted to wish that he and those about him had been born less heavily handicapped by faults and weaknesses _of body and mind. Some such fleeting thought may be forgivable now and then, but it does not bear cross-examina-tion. It is not Nature’s way to give something for nothing. The insect which issues from its cell or egg fully armed fos the battle of its life has to pay the price. That blind efficiency has been bought at the price of all capacity for open-eyed ascent in the scale of being. So far as conscious betterment is concerned, the life directed solely by instinct is committed to a eul de sac from which it cannot hope to retreat. If man could be born perfect a like fate would be in store for him. Ho would be equal to all emergencies, but he would know neither that they were emergencies nor that he was equal to them. He would have joined his insect prototypes among the “ finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark.”