Give your opinion about instinctand reasonInstinct ppt

Give your opinion about instinct and reason Instinct is, properly, the innate and inherited aptitude which drives living creatures to do certain things which seem to be quite natural, w

Give your opinion about instinct

and reason

Instinct is, properly, the innate and inherited aptitude

which drives living creatures to do certain things which

seem to be quite natural, without any conscious design

More precisely, “It is a natural spontaneous tendency or

impulse in the lower animals or in men, moving them

without reasoning towards action essential to their

existence, preservation, or development; as the instinct of

self-preservation

Take a few examples of instinct Bees make six-sided cells

for storing their honey They always make them the same

size and the same shape (mathematically perfect

hexagons) Yet they never learn to make them; for the

young worker-bees, as soon as they are born, set to make

these cells as perfectly as the old experienced bees

Apparently, they do it spontaneously and have no

conscious purpose in doing this

In the same way, young birds have never seen a nest

built, and have had no lessons in the art of nest-building;

yet when the nesting time comes round, they know exactly

how to do it And a bird of one species will never build the

type of nest as that of another species, sparrows never

make nest as swallows do, not swallows like those of

bees

We cannot explain these actions of insects and birds As

they are naturally done without reasoning or conscious

design, but are due to some blind inner impulse, we say

they are due to “instinct” And we can sum up the

characteristics of instinct as the following:

1 instinct is adaptive, that is, directed to some end;

2 that end is somehow connected with the welfare of the

species or the individual;

3 the action is immediately perfect;

4 it is natural or inherited and not learned

By reason we mean the power of drawing certain logical

conclusions from given premises: the power of thinking of

choosing to do certain things because we consider them

wise or advantageous, and of doing things with a

conscious end in view For example, men do not build

houses as birds build nests They have a clear idea in

their minds what kind of house they want, and of what

material they need to make it The architect, after much

thought, draws a plan; and the builders calculate how

many bricks and how much mortar needed At every step,

there exists deliberate thought and conscious design and

choice So reason is quite different from instinct

Instinct is merely a natural ability to do something

Reason, on the contrary, can afford us much knowledge in

every field of endeavor Instinct does not make any

progress, but reason always does Instinct has no

consciousness in action, but reason has

It is commonly said that animals act on instinct and men

on reason But some higher animals, such as dogs,

horses and elephants have a certain amount of reason,

and we call them intelligent; and there is a lot of instinct in

men On the whole, however, reason is a characteristic of

men, and instinct of animals, such as bees, ants, spiders,

birds etc…