iv MENTAL DEVELOPMENT 59 



may, I think, be definitely distinguished from a compound 

 reflex as determining sensori-motor adjustment, and as such 

 its basis must be held to involve consciousness. 



As intelligence arises and directs action to ends remote 

 from the momentary situation, the need for the successive 

 adjustment of feeling to each detail in a train of actions 

 disappears, and the mind gains its freedom. Among our- 

 selves, accordingly, we do not find such intricately dove- 

 tailed series of acts determined by heredity as appear in 

 the animal world. But (a) we still respond to many per- 

 ceptions and situations with a feeling which popular 

 psychology calls instinctive, but which is really rather of 

 the nature of a reflex consciousness. The feeling of resent- 

 ment at an attack is as spontaneous and unreflective as the 

 muscular movements of the counterblow, (b) We still 

 have the permanent interests in the race preserving func- 

 tions the satisfaction of organic needs, sexual attraction, 

 parental love. Indeed the whole vaguer mass of the social 

 feelings are in their basis hereditary. But we are not 

 guided merely by instinct, because the power of looking at 

 life as a whole brings our various dispositions and ten- 

 dencies into relation with one another. We are not to 

 conceive the hereditary endowment of man as consisting 

 in a number of separate instincts so much as in the tempera- 

 ment and character, that basis or background of life which, 

 suffused as we grow up with experience, tends to determine 

 how we will take things, how we will regard fresh experi- 

 ence, and weave it into the whole of our life. Reason and 

 will are with us as hereditary as any capacity to feel or any 

 tendency to physical or mental response to special stimulus, 

 and it is a mistake to found human psychology on a row of 

 separate instincts that may be variously combined. What 

 we should emphasize rather is the element of heredity 

 which forms the substructure of all our thought, feeling 

 and action. 



Be this as it may, we have in instinct a method which 

 directs sensori-motor adjustment, and by so doing in- 

 extended vital processes. Finally, the relation between the present state 

 and the result to which it tends may come into consciousness, and in 

 proportion as it does so the conation becomes a purpose. 



