Instinct is a shapeless giant in the cave, massive, without hands or fingers or articulating lips or teeth or tongue; Behemoth, disdaining speech, disdaining particulars, lurking, surly, invincible, disdaining thoughts, always whole, never distributed, aboriginal, old as nature, and saying, like poor Topsy, “ never was born, growed.” In-different to the dignity of its function, it plays the god in animal nature as in human or as in the angelic, and spends its omniscience on the lowest wants.
How does a colt know how to stand the moment it is born; a stickleback fish to build a mating burrow and nest that is just shorter than its body length; a honey bee to make perfect, six-sided cells; a human infant to suckle? A psychologist will tell you that these behaviors are inherited and contrast them with learned behavior. But this is no explanation. It merely pushes the question back to a level where we have no direct experience, the level of the gene. How do genes code for behavior? How are they activated at precisely the correct time? When we know the answers to these questions we will still be left with the raw phenomena, which mechanisms can never explain.
Re. Growed like Topsy: Topsy is a slave girl in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe; published in 1852. The phrase “growed like Topsy” became a popular figure of speech used to describe something that grew without design or intention. See The Word Detective, May 20, 2003, http://www.word-detective.com/052003.html
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