Knowledge  it  has  none.  It  discriminates
most  delicately,  and  yet  blindly.  It  ex-
hibits action  without  ideas,  unlearnable
and  unimprovable.  Man,  too,  occasionally
shows  this  same  sort  of  adaptation.  Un-
taught, aye,  even  when  apt  to  be  misled  by
v/hat  he  has  been  taught,  he  sometimes
hits  on  the  exact  adjustment  of  his  conduct
to  the  person  he  is  dealing  with.  Such
conduct,  we  say,  shows  the  divination  of
85


BERGSON

sympathy.  And  some  such  sympathy l
is  the  instinct  with  which  we  must  credit
the  wasp  in  our  example.  It  directly
apprehends  the  living  life  itself — as,  indeed,
our  term  "  sympathy  "  implies.  In  radical
opposition  to  intelligent  knowledge,  it  appre-
hends the  singular  not  the  general,  things
not  relations.  And,  therefore,  the  animal
may  be  taught  the  "  name  "  of  a  thing  in
the  sense  that  it  may  attend  to  that  thing
when  it  hears  its  name ;  it  cannot  know
that  it  is  its  name,  for  the  operation  of
naming,  the  relation  of  a  sound  to  a  thing,
it  is  quite  unable  to  grasp.  The  child,  on
the  other  hand,  is  aware  at  a  very  early
age  what  naming  means ;  he  understands
that  an  object  is  being  named  to  him  and
himself  asks  the  name  of  other  things.
Instinct,  because  it  is  in  sympathy  with
but  few  manifestations  of  life,  because  it
cannot  reflect  on  itself,  cannot  generalize,
can  never  give  its  possessor  the  master-
key  to  the  operations  of  life.  If  it  added

1  fa.  Cr6.,  191.
