Which is the instinct — the feeling, or the fourteen months standing behind it?

You have been treating that as a question with two candidates on offer.

Take it again, and this time watch where the feeling comes in from.
It comes in last. It comes in already decided. It comes in with nothing attached to it.
What you have been calling instinct is the final four inches
of something that started in a chair, in the winter, with a folder open,
and you have spent two years arguing with the four inches.

The Book of the Scholar — Return 42:8