364 HEREDITY IN MAN 



McDougall further describes three general or non-specific 

 tendencies which have sometimes been classed as instincts. 1 

 Sympathy, or the sympathetic induction of the emotions, describes 

 the fact that instinctive behaviour incites similar behaviour in 

 the observer. Suggestion is denned as a process of communication 

 resulting in the acceptation with conviction of the communicated 

 proposition in the absence of logically adequate grounds for its 

 acceptance. Imitation, which has often been used to include 

 sympathy and suggestion, is in the limited sense adopted by 

 McDougall, the tendency to copy the bodily actions of some one 

 else. Finally there is the tendency to play. 



Apart, therefore, from temperament and the faculties connected 

 with cognition, we have to recognize predispositions towards 

 certain instincts and certain general tendencies. Without question 

 they differ in strength from man to man; without question 

 such differences are in large part attributable to varying pre- 

 dispositions in the germinal constitution, and we must presume 

 that such differences are in some way connected with differences 

 in nervous structure or organization. The subject is one of great 

 difficulty, and nothing can be affirmed regarding it with any 

 certainty. The ultimate modes of feeling seem to be those of 

 pleasure and displeasure, and of excitement and depression. It is 

 scarcely possible to stop at this point, and it seems that we have 

 to go on and attribute the more specific forms of feeling or emotions 

 to primary faculties incapable of further analysis. So, too, 

 conation or striving seems to be distinguishable into striving 

 towards and into striving away from an object. Again as with 

 feeling it appears that we have to go farther and presume certain 

 more clearly-defined faculties as indicated above. 



6. The difficulties are still greater with regard to cognition. 

 Analysis seems to bring us to three ultimate faculties those of 

 judgement, of comparison, and of association. 2 Judgement 

 consists in affirming or denying, and upon this faculty all higher 

 reasoning is built. Memory should perhaps be considered as 

 a special aspect of this faculty as the power to think of an 

 object over again, and to affirm or deny it to be the same object. 

 This faculty, together with the faculty of comparing, enables 

 that process of distinction and systematization to be performed 

 upon which all the higher developments are based. To these 



1 McDougall, Social Psychology, ch. iv. * Ibid., ch. iii. 



