198 Habit and Instinct. 



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human beings, in whom a far wider range of experience 

 and all sorts of intellectual and aesthetic factors are intro- 

 duced by their extended knowledge and thought. It is 

 therefore clearly of importance to eliminate, as far as 

 possible, the element of acquired experience, and to study 

 such responses as appear to have a pleasurable or an 

 emotional accompaniment in their instinctive purity. This 

 I have endeavoured to do in the observations on young 

 birds to which we must now return. Let us take pleasur- 

 able accompaniments first. 



The young moorhen I had in Yorkshire when he was 

 set free from his basket in the morning and taken to the 

 little beck, executed a pretty and characteristic dance, 

 stretching up his head, flapping his skinny wings, and 

 leaping up and down with springy action. There can be 

 little question that this morning dance, this engaging 

 discharge of pent-up energy, was accompanied by a 

 pleasurable state which, on Professor James's view, took 

 its origin in primary genesis from complex physiological 

 impulses carried inwards to the sensorium from all parts 

 of the body directly or indirectly participating in the 

 activity. Having performed his dance, if the day was 

 warm, and especially if the sun shone brightly, he would 

 wade into the running water and take his bath. He 

 ducked his head under, threw water over his shoulders, 

 fluttered his feathers, waved his arm-like wings, and 

 vigorously wagged his black tail. One could not resist 

 the conclusion that he obviously enjoyed his dip ; the 

 whole set of actions (which, by the way, are instinctive 

 in the narrower sense, and were performed in all their 

 perfection for the first time on the morning of the forty- 

 second day of life) seem to generate a pleasurable state 

 to which it would be hard for us, not being moorhens, to 

 give a name. He would then stand in the sun, and with 



