But what chiefly attracts the mind to it is its
strangeness. It looks, in fact, less like an instinct of one of the
inferior creatures than the superstitious observance of human beings,
who have knowledge of death, and believe in a continued existence after
dissolution; of a triba that in past times had conceived the idea that
the liberated spirit is only able to find its way to its future abode by
starting at death from the ancient dying-place of the tribe or family,
and thence moving westward, or skyward, or underground, over the
well-worn immemorial track, invisible to material eyes.
But, although alone among animal instincts-in its strange and useless
purpose--for it is as absolutely useless to the species or race as to
the dying individual--it is not the only useless instinct we know of:
there are many others, both simple and complex; and of such instincts we
believe, with good reason, that they once played an important part in
the life of the species, and were only rendered useless by changes in
the condition of life, or in the organism, or in both. In other words,
when the special conditions that gave them value no longer existed, the
correlated and perfect instinct was not, in these cases, eradicated, but
remained, in abeyance and still capable of being called into activity by
a new and false stimulus simulating the old and true. Viewed in this
way, the huanaco's instinct might be regarded as something remaining to
the animal from a remote past, not altogether unaffected by time
perhaps; and like some ceremonial usage among men that has long ceased
to have any significance, or like a fragment of ancient history, or a
tradition, which in the course of time has received some new and false
interpretation.
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