106 Habit and Instinct. 



proceeds, and the limbs gain strength, the instinctive 

 activity of locomotion, thus necessarily " deferred," may 

 manifest itself. But since the manifestation is — unlike 

 the deferred instinctive dive of the duck or the moorhen — 

 gradual, and since, under normal conditions, the gradual 

 development is accompanied by a good deal of individual 

 practice, the walking or running, though founded, no 

 doubt, on an instinctive basis, is not purely congenital. 

 It is, in part at least, the result of acquisition. The habit 

 is in such cases of double origin, partly instinctive, and 

 partly acquired. This is so in a great number of cases ; 

 and in them it is difficult to assign their due shares to 

 instinct and to habit. It is just for this reason that there 

 has been so much diversity of opinion in the matter. 

 Spalding,* in combating the views of "that school of 

 psychology which maintained that we and all other animals 

 had to acquire, in the course of our individual lives, all 

 the knowledge and skill necessary for our preservation," 

 went too far in the opposite direction in asserting " that 

 the progress of the infant is but the unfolding of inherited 

 powers." Such unfolding there is, but it is under the 

 guidance of individual experience. The regular flexions 

 and extensions of the legs, " which appear even months 

 before the first successful attempt to walk, when the child, 

 held upright on the floor, is pushed forward," are in- 

 stinctive, as Prof. Preyer f points out, and as Prof. Mark 

 Baldwin $ has also shown. But under normal circum- 

 stances the walking of the child is not solely an instinctive 

 activity : acquisition largely co-operates. Like the finished 

 flight of birds, it is a joint product of instinct and acquisi- 

 tion. In the precocious guinea-pig instinct predominates ; 



* Nature, vol. xii. pp. 507, 508. 



t Preyer, op. cit., p. 271. 



X "Mental Development of the Child and the Eace," p. 82. 



