impulse which Nature has given them being their best guide. The
carrier-pigeon or the bird of passage, taken a long distance from home
by a circuitous route, trusting to this "pilot-sense," flies back in a
straight course; and the hound takes the shortest way home through
fields where he has never previously set foot.

The existence of instinct prior to all experience or instruction, and
its perfection in the beginning, render cultivation and improvement not
only unnecessary, but impossible. As it is with the individual, so it
is with the race. One generation of the irrational tribes does not
improve upon the preceding or educate its successor. The web which you
watched the spider weaving in your open window last summer, carefully
measuring off each radius of her wheel and each circular mesh by one of
her legs, was just such a web as the spider wove of old when she was
pronounced to be "little upon the earth, yet exceeding wise."

This incapacity for education is what so widely separates instinct from
the rational powers of man. Man gathers knowledge and transmits it from
generation to generation. He is not born with a ready skill, but with a
capacity for it. His mind is formed destitute of all connate knowledge,
that it may acquire the knowledge of all things. "Man's imperfection at
his nativity is his perfection; while the perfection of brutes at their
nativity is their imperfection." No rational being has ever arrived at
such perfection that he cannot still improve; he can travel on from one
attainment to another in a perpetual progress of improvement. He is,
moreover, free to choose his own path of action; while the being of
instinct is governed by a power which is not subject to his will, and
which confines him to a narrow path which he cannot leave. But
instinct, within its narrow limits, in many cases quite transcends
reason in its achievements.