156 Habit and Instinct. 



memory that the profiting by experience is made possible ? 

 There can, of course, be no objection to ascribing the facts 

 to memory. But let it be clearly noted that the memory 

 is of such a kind that this suggests that ; it is just the 

 connection by means of which this and that are linked 

 together, so that this revives that in memory, to which the 

 term " association " is applied. 



What, then, we may now ask, is the relation of ex- 

 perience to impulse '? In reply to this question, we may 

 say that the congenital impulse may, through experience, 

 be confirmed, modified, or held in check; and that such 

 confirmation, modification, or inhibition gives rise to an 

 acquired impulsive tendency. Let us, however, look a 

 little more closely into the nature of this acquired im- 

 pulsive tendency. It is not going too far to say that every 

 bit of practical experience leaves the organism something 

 different from what it found it. The chick that has had 

 experience of the nastiness of the cinnabar larva is 

 neither organically nor impulsively what it was before 

 the experience. It is an organism with different reactive 

 tendencies. And the difference is due to acquisition. Let 

 us state this in terms of the conception of impulse 

 which has already been formulated. Impulse, I said, is 

 the tendency of any organism to satisfy its needs and fulfil 

 the conditions of its being. Now, the chick comes into the 

 world with certain congenital impulses, certain tendencies 

 to satisfy its congenital needs and to fulfil the inherited 

 conditions of its being. But at the touch of experience 

 its needs are modified or further defined ; the conditions of 

 its being are no longer what they were, for they too have 

 undergone modification or further definition. On the con- 

 genital basis has been grafted an acquired disposition. 

 When new stimuli come there is an impulsive tendency 

 to realize, not the old being, the conditions of which were 



