The Homing Instinct in Lost Objects: A Study Together With an Added Reflection

THE possibility of consciousness in certain forms of vegetable life is beginning to attract the attention of biologists. Plants, we are told, have nerves and can feel pain.

This idea has led me to speculate upon the possibilities of conscious feeling and motive as existing in objects ordinarily deemed inanimate. Do lost objects, for example, know that they are lost? Are books conscious of neglect? Or, on the other hand, of the loving care of their owners or readers? Do they when lost possess a homing instinct, which manifests itself under certain conditions, like that of certain pigeons, so that, of their own volition, they somehow get themselves in the way of returning or of being returned home?

This article is a tentative inquiry into phenomena in this field.

After a considerable experience in losing articles, I have been coming to an opinion — which rests as yet, I confess, upon incomplete data — that nothing is ever really lost. Lost articles sooner or later come back. This includes, in my own experience, instances in no inconsiderable variety: watches, cameras, hats, tennis rackets, lecture notes, suitcases, canes, personalia — anything which an ordinary professorial mind can overlook, forget, or lose, in going from one place to another. (I exclude from the field of the present inquiry as irrelevant the phenomena which arise when one conjoins, in the preparation for an evening affair, a dress coat and waistcoat with the trousers of a business suit. In this case, to be sure, certain normal associations are overlooked, but nothing is actually lost.) The places where belongings of mine have been lost have included hotels, railway stations, subways, trains, piers, steamer berths, churches, lecture-rooms, other people’s houses. Once in California I left a hat lying upon an open rack in a large hotel, and journeyed to a distant city. Two weeks later I returned to the hotel and found the hat reposing on the rack, awaiting my arrival, though the housekeeper informed me that the rack had been daily cleared of its contents and that no one had in the interval seen my hat.

The fate of a lost object seems to have nothing to do with the kind of locality where the object is left, except that — according to my tentative observation — the chances of return seem on the whole better in a densely populated area than in a sparsely settled one. Things lost in a city, within my experience, are more likely to return than those lost in the country.

Umbrellas alone seem to lie outside my hypothesis and to constitute an exception. My experience in losing these articles is ample, but seems to require a separate investigation, which I shall defer for the present. Umbrellas do not return. I incline to think that some objects, when lost, lack the homing instinct. Perhaps this instinct in lost objects is a sign of a superior organization whose laws are as yet not understood. Umbrellas are perhaps examples of deficient evolutionary development.

A few months ago the university with which I am connected awarded an honorary degree to a distinguished citizen upon his seventy-fifth birthday. On my way home after the ceremony, by way of the subway and a taxi, I left somewhere my suitcase, but for three whole days failed to note its disappearance. Finally, on the fourth day, I awoke to its loss. The suitcase was a new one, borrowed, and marked with other initials than my own. It contained my silk gown, with cap and hood, which I don only upon formal academic occasions. Now to lose a silk gown and hood, not to mention a suitcase, is a matter in these days to give one pause; and on account of it I fell into an uncommon depression of spirits, for I could see little likelihood that even a willing cap and gown could get back to me after such an unpromising separation. Moreover, the time when I discovered my loss was Columbus Day — a holiday.

I called up the Lost Property Room of the Interborough. It was closed. Then I went, with deep and grave misgivings, to the point where I had changed from subway to taxi. I could recall neither the taxi, its driver, nor the color scheme of his car. My search for a taxi office revealed that there was none in the region — the cars carrying passengers from that station were only such floaters as happened to find themselves in the neighborhood. I went out and stood on the curb, with my hands in my pockets, and watched the roaring traffic as it passed.

In a moment a car — a red one — drew up in front of me and stopped. I obeyed an impulse and hailed the driver.

‘If a passenger left a suitcase by accident in your car, what would you do with it?’

‘Did you lose a suitcase?’

‘ Yes.’

‘ When ? ’

‘Last Thursday.’

‘I’ve got it, I think, at home.’

Long experience with the homing instinct of lost articles enabled me to assume and to maintain the semblance of customary behavior. The normal thing had happened. The suitcase was about to return to its owner. Within fifteen minutes the case and its contents were in my possession.

I hasten at this point to remind the reader that the purpose of this incident is not to awaken reflection upon the discovery of an honest taxi-driver, but to exemplify the curious homing instinct of lost things. However, for the sake of the ethically and sociologically minded, and also to aid in establishing the scientific nature of my inquiry, I record here that this taxidriver serves the Twentieth Century Taxi Company, and carries the license number 6408, and that I met him at the corner of Burnside and Jerome Avenues in the Bronx.

My second contribution to the general inquiry of this paper has an even more remarkable character. It reveals the homing instinct working under quite different conditions, and in the face of almost an infinity of opposing chances.

At this point I wish to protest, against the merely mathematical approach to this kind of problem. The mathematician proposes a purely intellectual solution, a solution along the lines of mere mechanical chance and probability. He is cold-blooded and unemotional. He is often unsympathetic, even cynical. He tries to measure in figures the probability that after three days of separation I should come into contact, instantly and on the same spot, with the same wandering taxi-driver who had taken me with my bag four days earlier to the university. Then he insists upon inquiring into the further question of the ratio of likelihood that I originally engaged an honest taxi-driver, as distinguished from one that would have carried my bag at once to a pawnshop. Then, multiplying these ratios together, he will assure me that the likelihood of my recovering my bag in the way that I have described is in the ratio of one to the result of this operation. Finally he says that such things are bound to happen every so often anyway, under the regular laws of chance and probability.

He will not take note of the possibility of any subtle sympathy between one’s lost property and its owner, operating across unknown and unmeasured spaces, and involving, it may be, the hand of unwitting agents, which nevertheless ultimately succeeds somehow in drawing them together into the happiness of reunion. Working without the recognition of this factor of sympathy, which I have called the homing instinct, the method of the mathematician breaks down. I reject it altogether. It does violence to the hypothesis of the homing instinct. I seek to awaken attention to a new field of empirical possibilities.

Now I wish to present a new and even more remarkable instance, hitherto unrecorded, not only of sensibility, but even, it would seem, of volition on the part of inanimate lost objects. In the case which I am now about to narrate, the laws of chance are staggered, and the mathematician is put out of court. The hypothesis which I have suggested, that of the sympathetic response of the lost object to the appeal of home and owner, seems to afford the only working solution.

I passed the year 1923-24 in California on sabbatical leave. Occasionally I spent a few hours looking through a particularly interesting old bookshop which I discovered in a Southern city. The books there were often old and rare, yet moderate in price. Some of them came from early Californian and old Mexican families, and withal there were among them numbers of books of seventeenthand eighteenth-century English imprint. After I had picked up one or two interesting examples of early Mexican printing, I wrote to the executive of our university library, asking if he could spare me a little money to spend in behalf of the university, and he very generously put at my disposal what money he felt could be spared for such a purpose.

From time to time during the year I had small packages of books sent on to him, always with the privilege of return in case of duplicates. By June I had spent all the available money; but on a last visit to my friend the book dealer I found a half-dozen inexpensive volumes which I thought the library should have, and asked a clerk, as usual, to set them aside, and forward them with a bill It happened that the bill preceded the books.

On receiving this supplementary bill, — presented after my allowance was all gone, — the library executive looked it over with a measure of austerity and, taking his pen in hand, fashioned a letter somewhat in this manner: —

I have received from R——an additional bill for books not yet received. Upon the list I find a three-volume edition of a history of California in French, dated 1767, and listed at $25. Why did you want this book? Unless you urge keeping it here I shall return it to the dealer.

Now it happened that the book was one which, up to the time of receiving this letter, I had never heard of. I had not ordered it for the university. I had never seen it. And I had not even considered so expensive a purchase of any volume at that time.

So I replied in calming language: —

R——has blundered. I never ordered the book. Send it back to him with charges collect.

Before this letter arrived at its destination, the books reached the library and ihe librarian personally opened the box. After studying the volumes for some time, he addressed to me a letter which began: —

What sort of joke are you trying to put up on this university?

I do not remember the rest, of the language of this letter; but it narrated how he had taken the three volumes of the California history from the box and, being impressed with something familiar in their appearance, had consulted our card catalogue. There he had found a card bearing a similar title. On going to the shelves, he found the books missing. Returning to the check list annually prepared to record the presence or the absence from our shelves of the books listed in our catalogue, he found Venegas: L’Histoire naturelle et civile de Californie, Paris, 1767, marked ‘missing.’ Further examination of the books that had come in from California disclosed on the several volumes of the set, partly effaced, the university shelf-mark, and in each volume the private university stamp. It was evident that the books were ours.

But how did it happen that these books, stolen from our shelves at some time in the past and transported, by sale and resale, across the continent, three thousand miles away, were able to utilize my casual purchase as an agency by which to return to the shelves from which they had been removed by lawless and covetous fingers? To this question I can only offer the hypothesis of the homing instinct. I never purchased the books. I never saw them. Neither R—— nor any of his clerks sold them to me or had conscious knowledge of their relation to my purchase. Yet somehow this set of books crept into the parcel that was the only available agency for bringing them home to the family of books from which they had been reft.

The mathematician’s determination of the actual probabilities involved in this occurrence are as staggering as infinity itself. That solution is unsatisfactory because it is inconceivable. In the absence of any other conceivable solution other than a supernatural one, I urge that of the homing instinct.

Into the remainder of this story I hesitate to go. In it the theologian will see, not the operation of the new principle of the psychology of inanimate objects which I am seeking to establish, but the very finger of Fate itself. As one seeking a scientific approach to a new class of phenomena, I do not wish to be led into extravagant claims. Even to sustain my theory I am not prepared to assert the power of inanimate objects cruelly torn from their natural and proper home to organize punishment of responsible parties; but here are the remaining facts, so far as I have them, concerning the theft of these books from our university library, and the fate of the criminal who did the deed.

We were, of course, very anxious to ascertain how they had been taken; and through the coöperation of Mr. R——, the dealer, and our own librarian we were able to trace this set of books backward by successive sales, first by a well-known dealer in New York, then through three previous sales, including one public auction. The original seller of the books, so far as we were in this way able to trace him, was a certain character well known to dealers in secondhand books and works of art, long suspected by them of the theft of books from public libraries and of the fabrication of antique work in the field of painting. After a little labor in this direction, involving correspondence between California and New York, Mr. R——

informed me that he was in receipt of word that this person had been, after the arrival of information concerning the loss and return of our set of books, placed under arrest.

Of the full details of this arrest and trial, and of the subsequent sentencing of the criminal, I am, I regret to say, as yet imperfectly informed. The temptation to be drawn from a rigorous scientific investigation of the psychology of inanimate objects into the presentation of a remarkable example of poetic justice or of supernatural intervention is almost irresistible. Nevertheless, as a person of serious

intent, I am committed to the purpose of scientific inquiry. I resist the temptation and present only the facts as I have known them concerning this remarkable homecoming to our library of a rather valuable set of books, in a manner which involved no conscious application of any agency or force except that of the homing instinct originating in the books themselves.

My title calls for an added reflection. If such is the feeling of a book for its shelf in the university where it belongs that time and space and the covetousness of man cannot overcome it or prevail against it, how glorious it would be if all the lost alumni of our university, the sons of Alma Mater, beings who are not inanimate but animate, about whose consciousness or power of volition there is no question, who are able to move from place to place if they will, should all henceforward, in obedience to a homing instinct, suddenly respond to the waiting and outstretched arms of Alma Mater! Suppose that all of them henceforth were to respond to the claim of her mothership over them, and, flocking to her support, enable her to go on with the full measure of potential power made actual that would then be hers! It is a conception to inspire visions and dreams.