700 COMPARATIVE AND GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY 



It will be said that the word implies those external conditions to 

 which the organism as a whole is adapted through heredity or 

 accommodated through acquired modifications of structure or 

 function. It will be urged that it is this external environment with 

 which the control-system is in relation, arid that the suggestion 

 I put forward involves an unwarrantable departure from all the 

 recognized canons of biological interpretation. And yet, having 

 all this in view, I venture to put forward the conception in the 

 interests of psychological interpretation. There is not time now 

 adequately to discuss it, even were this the appropriate occasion; 

 only the salient features can be indicated and that very briefly. 

 The determining conditions of psychologically-guided or intelligent 

 behavior, as distinguished from responses which are purely auto- 

 matic, are what we sum up under the term experience. It is com- 

 monly said that this experience is that which stands for, or repre- 

 sents, or symbolizes the environment. I wish to suggest that it is 

 the psychological environment under the influence of which auto- 

 matic responses and instinctive modes of procedure are modified, 

 and that in all cases it includes more than the actual presentations 

 of the environment as that term is used by the biologist. It includes 

 the meaning which that environment has acquired. A chick that 

 has had some acquaintance with the nature of wasps inhibits the in- 

 stinctive tendency to pick at one when it is presented to sight. That 

 and that alone is the presentation of the external environment at 

 the moment when inhibition is brought into play. That and that 

 alone is not the determining factor in the intelligent avoidance of 

 the insect. This controlling factor is the meaning within experience 

 which the presentation suggests. It may be said that what is sug- 

 gested is a potentiality of the external environment. But the con- 

 trolling influence of potentialities is hardly a satisfactory conception. 

 What is actually present then and there is the experience, modifying 

 the output of automatic response. This is to be regarded, according 

 to the suggestion I put forward, as the psychological environment. 

 Bui it is physiologically embodied in the control-system which is the 

 actually present material environment under which the further 

 functioning of the automatic centres is conditioned in intelligent 

 behavior. The essential points, then, are these: (1) Experience, 

 in so far as it controls behavior, may be regarded as the environment 

 which supplies the conditions of guidance; (2) what the biologist 

 terms the environment is a product of experience ; (3) for the physi- 

 ologist, experience must be translated into its neural concomitants 

 in the control-system; (4) hence, if, psychologically, experience 

 may be regarded as a conditioning environment, then, physiolog- 

 ically, the control-system, as its organic embodiment, may be so 

 regarded. 



