38 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



motions of animals. But it almost always was in a practical 

 sense that they spoke of such an impossibility. We under- 

 stand it in an epistemological sense. There may be feelings 

 quite unknown to us, such authors have said ; therefore it 

 would be better not to speak about feelings. But we say : the 

 " being " of " feelings in Nature is meaningless altogether. 

 " Being " relates to bodily movements and changes, in that 

 sense of " being " which is the only starting-point of all 

 science, in the sense of " being given to my Ego." 



It is true : the concept of " being " may be enlarged by 

 an advanced philosophical science ; we ourselves have 

 enlarged it, and shall do so further on by introducing 

 potentialities as " being." But even such potentialities if 

 conceived as natural agents or factors would never be 

 " consciousness." The word " conscious "' belongs to intro- 

 spective psychology exclusively. 



@. THE ACTUAL PROBLEM. DEFINITIONS 



But what about instincts ? How are we to formulate 

 our legitimate and scientific problem ? It seems to me 

 that there can be but little doubt how we are to formulate 

 it. Are those animal movements, commonly called instincts, 

 such that they might be founded on a machine, a physico- 

 chemical manifoldness in space, embracing only physico- 

 chemical elemental factors, or are there some features in 

 instincts which forbid us to assume the existence of such a 

 machine even hypothetically ? 



Let us first try to give a purely verbal definition of the 

 instinctive motions in question. It will prove to be rather 

 difficult to find an under limit of instinct, though it is easy 



