292 THE HUMAN SPECIES 



needs of the individual representing the sum of ancestral ex- 

 periences in the struggle for existence. The knowledge of what 

 is harmful or harmless is transmitted hereditarily to succeeding 

 generations until the corresponding movements become purely 

 reflex. Even Wundt admits instinctive actions to be move- 

 ments which were originally simple, or complex, voluntary acts 

 ultimately transformed by habit during the individual life, or 

 in the course of a general evolution, into acts which are wholly 

 or partly mechanical. In this he agrees with Haeckel, who 

 divides instincts into two fundamental classes, primary instincts 

 or the impulses to self-preservation and the preservation of the 

 species, and secondary instincts manifested by acts originally 

 conscious and deliberate but which by habit have acquired an 

 automatic character. Physiological psychology has long ago 

 ceased to waste time in discussing the old theory according to 

 which the animal instincts are of a nature apart from the human 

 while the intelligence is to some extent similarly innate. 



Man too has his instincts if thereby we understand purposive 

 involuntary actions, partly impulsive, partly reflex. Walking, 

 for instance, is an instinctive impulse learnt with great difficulty, 

 but its movements eventually become mechanical just in the 

 same way as writing, pianoforte playing, etc. Wundt ] goes so 

 far as to allow that mankind may be regarded as the richest 

 of all creatures in instincts. " Man shares with the birds the 

 instinct to live in wedlock ; like the fox he educates his chil- 

 dren ; he has the beaver's impulse to build houses and the bee's 

 custom of founding states and sending forth colonies ; while he 

 has in common with the ant a pleasure in war, in slave-making, 

 and in the domesticating of useful animals." The last examples 

 are, however, not striking, for primitive man does not instinc- 

 tively resort to warfare, slave-making and domestication of 

 animals, but arrives at these and many other equally instinctive 

 actions by reasoning and deliberation. Wundt is perfectly 

 correct in regarding the original sources of acquired human 

 instincts as being mimetic impulses, although I cannot agree 

 with the distinction he draws between human and animal 

 instincts which makes the former " the fruits of a continuous 

 intellectual development not a trace of which is demonstrable 



1 Wundt, loc. cit., p. 396. 



