162 S. J. HOLMES 



response then resolves itself into the formation of associations. 

 Withdrawing and defensive responses are usually initiated by 

 pain giving stimuli and the instinctive or random movement which 

 brings a painful stimulus is inhibited under similar conditions in 

 the future, not because 1 of the pain of its physiological correlate 

 but because it comes to bo associated with a withdrawing or de- 

 fensive and hence an incongruous or inhibitory reaction. Pleas- 

 ure and pain thus interpreted have no mysterious power of stamp- 

 ing in or stamping out certain associations. Whether the result 

 is reinforcement or inhibition depends on the way in which a 

 reaction and the secondary responses resulting from the situation 

 in which the organism is thereby brought, happen to harmonize. 

 The step from instinct to intelligence viewed as a physiological 

 process involves, therefore, no essentially new element beyond the 

 well known physiological properties of the nervous system, and 

 we are not committed to any particular hypothesis as to the physio- 

 logical accompaniments of pleasure and pain, or pleasantness 

 and unpleasantness, in order to understand how behavior may 

 become adaptively modified. How far the interpretation given will 

 enable us to explain the development of intelligence I do not pre- 

 tend to say. It may break down m attempts to apply it to higher 

 forms of learning, but it affords a useful working hypothesis and 

 takes us a way, I think, towards the solution of our problem. 



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