Consciousness and Instinct. 139 



aspect is a matter of somewhat hazardous inference, it is 

 advisable to fix our attention on the organic aspect Let 

 us therefore endeavour to apply to instinct the conclusions 

 ■which seem to result from our brief sketch of the nature 

 of impulse. 



Taking once more the case of the recently hatched chick 

 as a simple and sufficiently typical one, we may put the 

 matter in this way. The need for food is beginning to 

 make itself felt, and to throw the organism into a state of 

 preparedness for the response appropriate to the satis- 

 faction of hunger. Acting on the chick thus prepared to 

 respond, the sight of a small, perhaps moving, object 

 stimulates the pecking activity as an organic response, and 

 the result of this is that the organism under the influence 

 of the general need, supplemented by the special stimulus, 

 is, so to speak, thrown into a state of unstable equilibrium. 

 It is consciously or unconsciously urged to strike at the 

 moving object. The stimulus is continued ; and at length, 

 when the instability reaches a certain pitch, the organism 

 topples over to the peck. For the stimulus must generate 

 a certain amount of organic instability before the organic 

 mechanism will fall to the response. Now it is quite 

 possible that before the organism actually falls to the 

 response, there are outgoing currents which throw the 

 mechanism into a state of preparedness to respond, and 

 that there is a faint backstroke from the motor mechanism 

 thus partially stimulated, which is accompanied by a 

 conscious state. Let us assume that this is so, and 

 endeavour to fill in hypothetically the conscious accom- 

 paniments of the successive stages of an instinctive 

 response. First, there is an indefinite feeling of want 

 or need, such as hunger, afferent in origin ; then there is 

 the felt stimulus at sight of a moving grub or worm, also 

 obviously afferent; on this there may follow a state of 



