44 THE PLAY OF ANIMALS. 



James is perfectly right when he says that the sitting 

 hen, for example, needs no further experience or psychic 

 process than the feeling that the egg is just " the-never- 

 to-be-too-much-sat-upon object." * 



From all this it appears that there is no doubt that 

 inherited instincts exist, and that a positive rather than 

 a negative criticism will be needed in dealing with this 

 idea, which, indeed, is much easier to affirm than to ex- 

 plain. We at once reach the conclusion, however, that it 

 is necessary to eliminate from the definition of instinct 

 the transcendental-teleological method of conceiving it 

 — a task which has been attempted by the promulgators 

 of the Lamarck-Darwinian theory. " An important rea- 

 son for the slow advance of scientific knowledge is the 

 universal and almost unconquerable adherence to teleo- 

 logical conceptions, which are substituted for distinctly 

 scientific ones. Nature may affect us ever so impressively 

 and ever so variously, but it is all lost upon us because we 

 look for nothing in her manifestations that we have not 

 already read into them; because we will not permit her 

 to make the advances, but are always trying with impa- 

 tient, ambitious reasoning to approach her. Then, when 

 in the course of centuries there comes one who draws 

 near to her with a quiet, modest, and receptive mind, 

 and lights upon innumerable phenomena which we, by 

 our preoccupation, have overlooked, we are amazed in- 

 deed that so many eyes should not have seen them be- 

 fore in such clear light. This striving with unnecessary 

 haste after harmony before the various tones which 

 should compose it have been collected, this violent 



enfants. [See also the experiments of Baldwin, Mental Develop- 

 ment in the Child and the Kace, second edition, chap, v, § 1.] 



* W. James, The Principles of Psychology, London, 1891, vol. 

 ii, p. 387. 



