44 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



similar problem will meet us in our analysis of action, and 

 will be fully discussed on that occasion. Moreover, the 

 whole of our present analysis rests on a problematic basis : 

 for nothing is known at present with absolute certainty about 

 individualised stimuli of instinctive motions. But it seems 

 to me highly probable that future investigation will dis- 

 cover such cases, and the present discussion is written 

 particularly in order to encourage research in this direction. 

 Bees and ants especially, but vertebrates too, it seems to 

 me, would have to be studied with respect to the question 

 whether there are cases in which specific complicated bodies 

 that are " seen " may be the stimuli of real instincts. 1 



If we like to give up for a moment our strictly scientific 

 language and allow ourselves the use of the common 

 pseudo-psychological terminology, we may say that all cases 

 in which individualised stimuli were at work would require 

 the assumption of a something that would be nearly related 

 to the " innate ideas ' refuted by Locke in another sense. 

 Physiologists of the old school of the German " Xatur- 

 philosophie " often have spoken of a sort of dreaming as 

 being the foundation of instinctive life. It would be this 

 sort of dreaming that we should meet here, and the only 

 difference between the old investigators and ourselves would 

 be one of terminology : we should not speak of dreaming or 

 of innate ideas, but, as naturalists arguing from the stand- 

 point of critical idealism, we should say that an autonomic, 



1 In a former publication (Die " Seele") I distinguished two classes 

 of "reflexes," the fixed and the " freely combined " ones (" frei-coinbiniert ") 

 the word "reflex" being used in a wider sense than in the present book. 

 All " freely combined " reflexes, it seems to me, might present quite the same 

 set of analytical problems as true instincts do, in every respect provided 

 they are not simple forms of "acting," as indeed the righting reactions of the 

 starfish are (see page 31 f.). 



