REGULATION IN BEHAVIOR 



It was the interference with the physiological processes that caused the 

 changes in behavior. As soon therefore as this interference ceases, there 

 is no further cause for change. The organism selects and retains the 

 favorable condition reached, merely by ceasing to change its behavior 

 when interference ceases. 



Thus in the lowest organisms we find regulation occurring on the 

 basis of the three following facts : 



1. Definite internal processes are occurring in organisms. 



2. Interference with these processes causes a change of behavior and 

 varied movements, subjecting the organism to many different conditions. 



3. One of these conditions relieves the interference with the internal 

 processes, so that the changes in behavior cease. 



It is clear that regulation taking place in this way does not require 

 that the end or purpose of the action shall function in any way as part 

 of its cause, as is held in various vitalistic theories. There is no evi- 

 dence that a final aim is guiding the organism. None of the factors 

 above mentioned appear to include anything differing in essential prin- 

 ciple from such methods of action as we find in the inorganic world. 



Now an additional factor enters the problem. By the process which 

 we have just considered, the organism reaches in time a movement that 

 brings relief from the interfering conditions. This relieving response 

 becomes fixed through the operation of the law of the readier resolu- 

 tion of physiological states as a result of repetition (Chapter XVI, Sec- 

 tion 10). After reaching the relieving response a number of times by a 

 repeated succession of movements, a recurrence of the interfering con- 

 dition induces more quickly the relieving response, and in time this 

 becomes the immediate reaction to this interfering condition. 



It is in this second stage of the process, when the relieving response 

 has become set through the law of the readier resolution of physiological 

 states by repetition, that an end or purpose seems to dominate the be- 

 havior. This end or purpose of course actually exists, as a subjective 

 state called an idea, in man. Whether any such subjective state exists 

 in the lower organism that has gone through the process just sketched, 

 of course we do not know. But some objective phenomenon, as a tran- 

 sient physiological state, would seem to be required in the lower animal, 

 corresponding to the objective physiological accompaniment of the idea 

 in man. The behavior in this stage is that which, in its higher reaches 

 at least, has been called intelligent. 



But so far as the objective occurrences are concerned, there would 

 seem to be nothing in this lalcr stage of the behavior involving any- 

 thing different in essential principle from what we find in the inorganic 

 world. The only additional factor is the law of the readier resolution of 



