238 THE FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS 
a conative tendency into being, is a metaphysical, not a 
scientific conception. 
We need not further discuss the psychological nature of 
impulse. Indeed, the little that has been said would not have 
been necessary to our inquiry were it not that we frequently 
have occasion to speak of animals as “ creatures of impulse,” 
and to refer to their behaviour as due to impulse. What do we 
mean by such expressions ? If we regard conative tendency 
as a fact (whatever may be said for or against its being also a 
specific experience), and if this fact is the tendency of the 
conscious situation to develope in certain definite ways, then 
we may define impulse with sufficient clearness by saying, 
with Dr. Stout, that it is characterized by being unreflective. 
Conative tendency thus comprises two categories—impulse and 
volition ; the one unreflective, the other involving deliberation. 
Before passing on to consider how impulse is partly 
determined by the feeling-tone and the emotional attributes 
of the conscious situation, we may first draw attention to the 
important way in which the results of conative tendency 
afford the data through which consciousness attains its unity 
in the midst of diversity of experience. 
We said that the impulses might be divided broadly into 
two classes—the one instinctive, the other acquired. Now, 
from the point of view suggested by a study of behaviour, if 
not also, as I am disposed to think, from the more general 
standpoint of a genetic study of mental development, it is 
convenient to start with the instinctive act and the conscious 
situation it implies. We have here a piece of experience 
which, if we may so phrase it, hangs together; in which 
experience of things in the environment is included in the 
same elemental synthesis with that of bodily acts in organic 
relation to these things. It is closely linked, on the one hand, 
with a foregoing act of attention, itself of the instinctive type ; 
closely linked, on the other hand, with the results of behaviour 
through which the environing things call forth a new conscious 
situation and evoke a further response. Thus not only does 
the experience of an instinctive act hang together, but a series 
