VI 



INSTINCT 105 



behaviour, not only in externals but even in such funda- 

 mental matters as the occasions for jealousy, the role of 

 social tradition is a preponderant influence. A savage 

 who would kill his wife for unpermitted license will lend 

 her cheerfully to a guest. We cannot attribute to the 

 uniform operation of an instinct conduct which may vary 

 from the extreme of licentiousness to the pattern of faithful 

 continence, or from the extravagance of devotion to a girl 

 to the courtesy which leads a man to open the door for 

 her grandmother. We have here human nature acting as 

 a whole in all its varied capacities, that run the gamut 

 from the bestial to the heroic. What is hereditary in 

 man is capacity, propensity, disposition, 1 but the capacities 

 are filled in, the propensities encouraged or checked, the 

 dispositions inhibited or developed by mutual inter- 

 actions and the pervading influence of the circumambient 

 atmosphere. Elements of true instinct remain, but in a 

 state of dilapidation. Heredity does not operate by itself 

 in human nature, but everywhere in interaction with 

 capacity to assimilate, to foresee, and to control. 2 



To sum up, instinct is an enduring interest determined [ 

 by heredity and directing action to results of importance to \ 



1 This term has been suggested by Mr. Graham Wallas in " The Great 

 Society." 



2 In particular I see no reason for identifying instinct as it exists in man 

 with certain primary emotions. To begin with, I am by no means clear 

 that emotion is at the root of all conation. On the contrary, emotion 

 appears to me to be that form of feeling which arises when conation is 

 obstructed or when there is an overplus of excitement which action does 

 not satisfy. Further, as Mr. Wallas has cogently argued, the intellectual 

 processes have quite as much title to be founded on instinct, if the term is 

 to be used of all inherited propensity, as any other. Thirdly, as indicated in 

 the text, the emotions belonging, say, to the sex instinct are not simple but 

 indefinitely various. And, lastly, I see no appropriateness in using the 

 term instinct, which in the animal world we apply to a definite train of 

 acts, in relation to a state of consciousness which does not necessarily 

 arise in response to a particular class of object, nor necessarily promote 

 any particular train of acts. But the main question is whether the 

 fundamental elements of human nature are of the nature of separate 

 units which inter-act like independent powers, or whether what is 

 inherited is an abstraction and what is acquired another abstraction, the 

 two together forming the concrete whole of actual behaviour. In the 

 main I believe the latter account to be true of human nature, the former 

 to be true of the lowest and partly true of the higher animals, and it is 

 this increasing unity of the organism as a whole which I take to be one 

 of the distinguishing marks of the human as compared with the animal 

 mind. 



