What is "instincts"

Usage examples of "instincts".

Several other points of resemblance between instincts and habits could be pointed out.

I think, explain this as readily as the slow and gradual accumulations of instincts which had never passed through the intelligent and self-conscious stage, but had always prompted action without any idea of a why or a wherefore on the part of the creature itself.

He must yield or die if he wants to differ widely, so as to lack natural instincts, such as hunger or thirst, or not to gratify them.

Every race has made its great blunders, to which it has nevertheless adhered, inasmuch as the corresponding modification of other structures and instincts was found preferable to the revolution which would be caused by a radical change of structure, with consequent havoc among a legion of vested interests.

As in repeating a well-known song, so in instincts, one action follows another by a sort of rhythm.

Such instincts may be supposed to have been acquired in much the same way as the instinct of a farmer to keep a cow.

Darwin cannot mean that it can be shewn that the wonderful instincts of neuter ants and bees cannot have been acquired either, as above, by instruction, or by some not immediately obvious form of inherited transmission, but that they must be due to the fact that the ant or bee is, as it were, such and such a machine, of which if you touch such and such a spring, you will get a corresponding action.

I can see no reason for doubting that in some of the ways suggested above, or in some combination of them, the phenomena of the instincts of neuter ants and bees can be brought into the same category as the instincts and structure of fertile animals.

Lamarck, and against any theory which would rob such instincts of their foundation in intelligence, and of their connection with experience and memory.

I can see no way of accounting for the existence of any one of these instincts, except on the supposition that they have arisen gradually, through perceptions of power and need on the part of the animal which exhibits them - these two perceptions advancing hand in hand from generation to generation, and being accumulated in time and in the common course of nature.

Life in its lowest form under the above conditions - and we cannot conceive of life at all without them - would be bound to vary, and to result after not so very many millions of years in the infinite forms and instincts which we see around us.

In spite of this sterility, however, is there anyone who will maintain that the widely differing structures and instincts of these castes are not due to inherited spiritual habit?

When that subtle energetic matrix is projected outwards as the body of the creature, we then perceive it as a living organism, complete with sense organs, behavioural patterns, instincts and everything else which makes a particular creature so individual.

They have different instincts, different pheromones, different patterns of behaviour, a different mind structure.

Their senses, instincts, behaviour, anatomy, physiology, digestion, biochemistry - the whole creature - is supremely designed and integrated for its bloodthirsty life.