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are within the body, the order of the responses is highly predictable. This is because the structure of the body is fairly stable. A person who begins to yawn always finishes because the muscle strain of the first part of the act causes the movements that complete the series. No one stops with an open mouth and fails to finish his yawn.

When movements bring stimuli from the external world to bear upon us, the chain of reflexes that results is predictable if the external situation is familiar and common. Man is strikingly adjusted to any of these commonly recurring situations in that his responses cause changes in the external world necessary to his preservation.

Sucking is a chain of reflexes, each reflex being called out by the stimulus that the preceding response produces, etc.

10. Instinctive Tendencies

[BETTS, George Herbert, The Mind and Its Education, Chap. xiii. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1924.]

By instincts are meant certain inborn tendencies to motor responses of characteristic types. As a more formal definition we may say that instincts are the tendency to act in certain definite ways without previous training and without a conscious end in view. The child is born ignorant and helpless. It has no memory, no reason, no experience of any sort. It has never performed a conscious act and does not know how to begin. It must get started with certain necessary motor responses, but how? It is at this point that instinct begins to function. A part of the child's native equipment is a nervous system preorganized to act in a characteristic way in the presence of certain stimuli: the lips are touched and nursing begins; pain or discomfort comes and a cry is the response. Instinctive acts in either animals or men do not require previous training; the baby does not have to be taught to suck or the duck to swim. There is no conscious end in view when the act is first performed, though the result itself may be highly desirable.

11. Blends in Instinct

[SEASHORE, Carl E., Introduction to Psychology, pp. 210-211. Copyright, 1923, by the Macmillan Co. Reprinted by permission.] Instinctive processes are normally blended into habituated conscious and voluntary processes. The pure instinct being essentially a theoretical matter, our main interest lies in the

instinctive blends or fusions in which instinct may be more or less a dominant factor. We recognize for instinct, then, the same flexibility of interpretation as we have recognized for the cognitive processes. For example, your eyes are cast upon the setting sun and you exclaim, "What a beautiful sunset!" Your mental processes at the moment are sensations, perceptions, memories, images, thoughts, emotions, and responses-let us add, instinctive joy. No mental process is purely of one mental category. Even in the simplest situation the mental organism tends to respond as a whole. This fact is fundamental for our conception of instinct or, as we may appropriately say, instinctive behavior.

12. No Separate Instincts

[DEWEY, John, Human Nature and Conduct. New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1922, pp. 150-156.]

It will be asserted that there are definite, independent, original instincts which manifest themselves in specific acts in a one-to-one correspondence.

It is not hard to see how the notion of a single and separate tendency grew up in the case of simpler acts like hunger and sex. The paths of motor outlet or discharge are comparatively few and are fairly well defined. Specific bodily organs are conspicuously involved. Hence there is suggested the notion of a correspondingly separate psychic force or impulse. There are two fallacies in this assumption. The first consists in ignoring the fact that no activity (even one that is limited by routine habit) is confined to the channel which is most flagrantly involved in its execution. The whole organism is concerned in every act to some extent and in some fashion, internal organs as well as muscular, those of circulation, secretion, etc. Since the total state of the organism is never exactly twice alike, in so far the phenomena of hunger and sex are never twice the same in fact. The difference may be negligible for some purposes, and yet give the key for the purposes of a psychological analysis which shall terminate in a correct judgment of fact. Even physiologically the context of organic changes accompanying an act of hunger or sex makes the difference between a normal and a morbid phenomenon.

In the second place, the environment in which the act takes place is never twice alike. Even when the overt organic discharge is substantially the same, the acts impinge upon a dif

ferent environment and thus have different consequences. It is impossible to regard these differences of objective result as indifferent to the quality of the acts. They are immediately sensed if not clearly perceived; and they are the only components of the meaning of the act. When feelings, dwelling antecedently in the soul, were supposed to be the causes of acts, it was natural to suppose that each psychic element had its own inherent quality which might be directly read off by introspection. But when we surrender this notion, it becomes evident that the only way of telling what an organic act is like is by the sensed or perceptible changes which it occasions. Some of these will be intra-organic, and (as just indicated) they will vary with every act. Others will be external to the organism, and these consequences are more important than the intra-organic ones for determining the quality of the act. For they are consequences in which others are concerned and which evoke reactions of favor and disfavor as well as coöperative and resisting activities of a more indirect sort. . . . A child gives way to what, grossly speaking, we call anger. Its felt or appreciated quality depends in the first place upon the condition of his organism at the time, and this is never twice alike. In the second place, the act is at once modified by the environment upon which it impinges so that different consequences are immediately reflected back to the doer. . . . The notion that anger still remains a single force is a lazy mythology.

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Again it is customary to suppose that there is a single instinct of fear, or at most a few well-defined subspecies of it. In reality, when one is afraid, the whole being reacts, and this entire responding organism is never twice the same. ... There is no such thing as an environment in general; there are specific changing objects and events. Hence the kind of evasion or running away or shrinking up which takes place is directly correlated with specific surrounding conditions. There is no one fear having diverse manifestations; there are as many qualitatively different fears as there are objects responded to and different consequences sensed and observed.

For any activity is original when it first occurs. As conditions are continually changing, new and primitive activities are continually occurring. The traditional psychology of instincts obscures recognition of this fact. It sets up a hard-and-fast preordained class under which specific acts are subsumed, so that their own quality and originality are lost from view. . . . When we recognize the diversity of native activities and the

varied ways in which they are modified through interactions with one another in response to different conditions, we are able to understand moral phenomena otherwise baffling. In the career of any impulse activity there are speaking generally three possibilities. It may find a surging, explosive discharge-blind, unintelligent. It may be sublimated-that is, become a factor coördinated intelligently with others in a continuing course of action. Thus a gust of anger may, because of its dynamic incorporation into disposition, be converted into an abiding conviction of social injustice to be remedied, and furnish the dynamic to carry the conviction into execution. Or an excitation of sexual attraction may reappear in art or in tranquil domestic attachments and services. Such an outcome represents the normal or desirable functioning of impulse; in which, to use our previous language, the impulse operates as a pivot, or reorganization of habit. Or again a released impulse activity may be neither immediately expressed in isolated spasmodic action, nor indirectly employed in an enduring interest. It may be "suppressed."

13. Instinctive, Not "Instincts"

[SEASHORE, Carl E., Introduction to Psychology, pp. 211-212. Copyright, 1923, by the Macmillan Co. Reprinted by permission.]

The present conception of instincts is to regard them as specific responses with inherited neural mechanisms which will be set into action by specific stimuli or situations. . . . We must think of instinctive processes as opposed to instincts. The noun in the plural implies the existence of acts intact; whereas the adjective recognizes the presence of instinctive traits in blends or complexes with other processes. The noun in the singular is used correctly in the same sense as the adjective. This becomes a matter of importance when the attempt is made to explain anything in terms of instinct.

After the chick has pecked the first time, after the bird has launched on its first flight, after the infant has nursed for the first time, each has experience which, from that point on, progressively modifies the instinctive behavior by associating it with their experience. The instinctive tendencies to peck, to fly, and to suck persist not only in the specific acts in which they first occurred, but also in countless other acts.

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14. The Origin of Fundamental Activities

[ALLPORT, Floyd Henry, Social Psychology, pp. 42-43. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1924.]

In behavior of this type (the so-called instinctive) two classes of activities can be recognized, those which have been inherited and those which have been learned by the individual. It is difficult in a given case clearly to distinguish between these two; and there is a wide difference of opinion as to their relative importance. Those who believe strongly in the inherited factors maintain that the mother has an inborn tendency to love and protect her offspring, or at least to protect small, defenseless creatures; that through certain neural dispositions, or coördinations of reflex arcs, laid down by heredity, we respond to strange and dangerous situations by avoidance, to small moving objects such as game by pursuit, to a chosen member of the opposite sex by lover-like behavior, to the sight of suffering by sympathy, to the thwarting of our endeavors by fighting, and to the sight of valued objects by seizing, 'cornering,' and hoarding. Such innate neural coördinations are termed instincts. They are more highly integrated than simple innate reflexes such as yawning, breathing, and crying; and they serve the purpose, implanted in the race through evolution, of adapting the individual to the more complex and significant features of the environment.

The explanation advanced by those who favor the hypothesis of learning restricts the rôle of inheritance to far simpler terms, and interprets these complex and purposeful integrations of reflexes as habits. Maternal behavior, for example, may be ascribed to an association formed between the child as a stimulus and the pleasant organic responses and sentiments connected with the husband, the home life, the plans for the future, the fondling and nursing of the infant, and the attitude of society toward the maternal relation. Again, our avoidance of a dangerous object may be due to a reaction of withdrawing from injury which has become associated by experience with the sight of the object which inflicts such injury.

Learning would be, according to this view, a more acceptable explanation than that of an 'instinct of flight.' Flight, moreover, is possible only after the acquisition of the habits of walking and running, just as the shrewd deal of the financier is possible only because of his acquired knowledge of the market and the laws of exchange.

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