0 the way people or animals naturally react or behave, without having to think or learn about it:
1 a natural ability that helps you decide what to do or how to act without thinking:
Moreover, proposals that were technically elegant could run up against the instincts of the politicians.
Our instincts about internal compromise suggest another political ideal standing beside justice and fairness.
By experience and by instinct, people understood what they could not write about.
There are simply too many constituencies, too many prejudices and too many conflicting instincts to satisfy.
With self-consciousness comes a demand for philosophical justification of the state-building process, but that process has been going on in obedience to elemental instinct.
Individuals in crowds, it was argued, lost their reason and yielded to instinct.
Their minds and wills atrophied, and they became solely creatures of sensual instinct.
Various social and institutional arrangements were put into place or expanded to deal with satisfying the gregarious instinct.
