The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

The older writings on instinct are ineffectual wastes of words, because their authors never came down to this defiaite and simple point of view, but smothered everything in vague wonder at the clairvoyant and prophetic power of the animals — so superior to anything in man — and at the beneficence of God in endowing them with such a gift. But God's beneficence endows them, first of all, with a nervous system ; and, turning our attention to this, makes instinct immediately appear neither more nor less wonderful than all the other facts of life.

Every instinct is an impulse. Whether we shall call such impulses as blushing, sneezing, coughing, smiling, or dodging, or keeping time to music, instincts or not, is a mere matter of terminology. The process is the same throughout. In his delightfully fresh and interesting work, Der Thierische Wille, Herr G. H. Schneider subdivides impulses {Triebe) into sensation-impulses, perception-impulses, and idea-impulses. To crouch from cold is a sensation-impulse ; to turn and follow, if we see people running one way, is a perception-impulse ; to cast about for cover, if it begins to blow and rain, is an imagination-impulse. A single complex instinctive action may involve successively the awakening of impulses of all three classes. Thus a hungry lion starts to seek prey by the awakening in him of imagination coupled with desire ; he begins to stolk it when, on eye, ear, or nostril, he gets an impression of its presence at a certain distance ; he springs upon it, either when the booty takes alarm and flees, or when the distance is sufiiciently reduced ; he proceeds to tear and devour it the moment he gets a sensation of its contact with his claws and fangs. Seeking, stalking, springing, and devouring are just so many different kinds of muscular contraction, and neither kind is called forth by the stimulus appropriate to the other.

Schneider says of the hamster, which stores corn in its hole: ** If we analyze the propensity of storing, we find that it consists of three impulses : First, an impulse to pich up the nutritious object, due to perception ; second, an impulse to carry it off into the dwelling-place, due to the idea of this latter ; and third, an impulse to lay it down there, due to the sight of the place. It lies in the nature of the ham dtftr that it should never see a full ear of corn without feeling a desire

to strip it ; it lies in its nature to feel, as soon as its cheek-pouches are filled, an irresistible desire to hurry to its home ; and finally, it lies in its nature that the sight of the storehouse should awaken the impulse to empty the cheeks" (p. 208). In certain animals of a low order the feeling of having executed one impulsive step is such an indispensable part of the stimulus of the next one, that the animal cannot make any variation in the order of its performance.

Now, ivhy do the various animals do what seem to its such strange things, in the presence of such outlandish stimuli ? Why does the hen, for example, submit herself to the tedium of incubating such a fearfully uninteresting set of objects as a nestful of eggs, unless she have some sort of a prophetic inkling of the result? The only answer is ad hominem. "We can only interpret the instincts of brutes by what we know of instincts in ourselves. Why do men always lie down, when they can, on soft beds rather than on hard floors ? Why do they sit round the stove on a cold day? Why, in a room, do they place themselves, ninetynine times out of a hundred, with their faces towards its middle rather than to the wall ? Why do they prefer saddle of mutton and champagne to hard-tack and ditch-water ? Why does the maiden interest the j^outh so that everything about her seems more important and significant than anything else in the world ? Nothing more can be said than that these are human ways, and that every creature likes its own ways, and takes to the following them as a matter of course. Science may come and consider these ways, and find that most of them are useful. But it is not for. the sake of their utility that they are followed, but because at the moment of following them we feel that that is the only appropriate and natural thing to do. Not one man in a billion, when taking his dinner, ever thinks of utility. He eats because the food tastes good and makes him want more. If you ask him why he should want to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philosopher he will probably laugh at you for a fool. The connection between the savory sensation and the act it awakens i^ for him absolute and sdbstverstdndlich, an ' a priori syn-

thesis ' of the most perfect sort, needing no proof but its own evidence. It takes, in short, what Berkeley calls a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as : Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down ? The common man can only say, " Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved !"

And so, probably, does each animal feel about the particular things it tends to do in presence of particular objects. They, too, are a priori syntheses. To the lion it is the lioness which is made to be loved ; to the bear, the shebear. To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her.*

Thus we may be sure that, however mysterious some animals' instincts may appear to us, our instincts will appear no less mysterious to them. And we may conclude that, to the animal which obeys it, every impulse and every step of every instinct shines with its own sufficient light, and seema at the moment the only eternally right and proper thing to do. It IS done for its own sake exclusively. What volup- * "It would be very simple-minded to suppose that bees follow theii queen, and protect her and care for her, because they are aware that without her the hive would become extinct. The odor or the aspect of theii queen is manifestly agreeable to the bees— that is why they love her so. Does not all true love base itself on agreeable perceptions much more than on representations of utility ?" (G. H. Schneider, Der Thierische Wille, p. 187.) A priori, there is no reason to suppose that any sensation might not in iome animal cause any emotion and any impulse. To us it seems unnatural that an odor should directly excite anger or fear; or a color, lust. Yet there are creatures to which some smells are quite as frightful as any ■ounds, and very likely others to which color is as much a sexual irritani as form.

tuous thrill may not shake a fly, when she at last discovers the one particular leaf, or carrion, or bit of dung, that out of all the world can stimulate her ovipositor to its discharge ? Does not the discharge then seem to her the only fitting thing ? And need she care or know anything about the future maggot and its food ? Since the egg-lo/ying instinxits are simple examples to consider, a few quotations about them from Schneider may be serviceable :

" The phenomenon so often talked about, so variously interpreted, so surrounded with mystification, that an insect should always lay her eggs in a spot appropriate to the nourishment of her young, is no more marvellous than the phenomenon that every animal pairs with a mate capable of bearing posterity, or feeds on materials capable of affording him nourishment. . . . Not only the choice of a place for laying the eggs, but all the various acts for depositing and protecting them, are occasioned by the perception of the proper object, and the relation of this perception to the various stages of maternal impulse. When the burying beetle perceives a carrion, she is not only impelled to approach it and lodge her eggs in it, but also to go through the movements requisite for burying it; just as a bird who sees his hen-bird is impelled to caress her, to strut around her, dance before her, or in some other way to woo her; just as a tiger, when he sees an antelope, is impelled to stalk it, to pounce upon it, and to strangle it. When the tailor-bee cuts out pieces of rose-leaf, bends them, carries them into a caterpillar- or mouse-hole in trees or in the earth, covers their seams again with other pieces, and so makes a thimble-shaped case — when she fills this with honey and lays an egg in it, all these various appropriate expressions of her will are to be explained by supposing that at the time when the eggs are ripe within her, the appearance of a suitable caterpillar- or mouse-hole and the perception of rose-leaves are so correlated in the insect with the several impulses in question, that the performances follow as a matter of course when the perceptions take place. . . .

" The perception of the empty nest, or of a single Qgg, seems in birds to stand in such a close relation to the physiological functions of oviparation, that it serves as a direct stimulus to these functions, while the perception of a sufficient number of eggs has just the opposite effect. It is well known that hens and ducks lay more eggs if we keep removing them than if we leave them in the nest. The impulse to sit arises, as a rule, when a bird sees a certain number of eggs in her nest. If this number is not yet to be seen there, the ducks continue to lay, although they perhaps have laid twice as many eggs as they are accustomed to sit upon. . . . That sitting, also, is independent of any idea of p'lroose and is a pure perception-impulse is evident, among other things,

from the fact that many birds, e.g. wild ducks, steal eggs from each other. . . . The bodily disposition to sit is, it is true, one condition [since broody hens will sit where there are no eggs], but the perception of the eggs is the other condition of the activity of the incubating impulse. The propensity of the cuckoo and of the cow-bird to lay their eggs in the nests of other species must also be interpreted as a pure perception-impulse. These birds have no bodily disposition to become broody, and there is therefore in them no connec tion between the perception of an egg and the impulse to sit upon it. Eggs ripen, however, in their oviducts, and the body tends to get rid of them. And since the two birds just named do not drop their eggs anywhere on the ground, but in nests, which are the only places where they may preserve the species, it might easily appear that such preservation of the species was what they had in view, and that they acted with full consciousness of the purpose. But this is not so. . . . The cuckoo is simply excited by the perception of quite determinate sorts of nest, which already contain eggs, to drop her own into them, and throw the others out, because this perception is a direct stimulus to these acts. It is impossible that she should have any notion of the other bird coming and sitting on her egg^ *

Remember that nothmg is said yet of the origin of instincts, but only of the constitution of those that exist fully formed. How stands it with the instincts of mankind ? Nothing is commoner than the remark that Man differs from lovrer creatures by the almost total absence of instincts, and the assumption of their work in him by 'reason.' A fruitless discussion might be waged on this point by tw o theorizers who were careful not to define their terms. * Reason ' might be used, as it often has been, since Kant, not as the mere power of * inferring,' but also as a name for the tendency to obey impulses of a certain lofty sort, such as duty, or universal ends. And ' instinct ' might have its significance so broadened as to cover all impulses whatever, even the impulse to act from the idea of a distant fact, as well as the impulse to act from a present sensation. Were the word instinct used in this broad way, it would of course be impossible to restrict it, as we began by doing, to actions done with no prevision of an end. We must of course avoid a quarrel about words, and the facts of the case are

really tolerably plain. Man has a far greater variety of impulses than any lower animal ; and any one of these impulses, taken in itself, is as ' blind ' as the lowest instinct can be ; but, owing to man's memory, power of reflection, and power of inference, they come each one to be felt by him, after he has once yielded to them and experienced their results, in connection with di, foresight of those results. In this condition an impulse acted out may be said to be acted out, in part at least, for the sake of its results. It is obvious that every instinctive act, in an animal ivith memory y must cease to be * blind ' after being once repeated, and must be accompanied with foresight of its ' end ' just so far as that end may have fallen under the animal's cognizance. An insect that lays her eggs in a place where she never sees them hatched must always do so ' blindly ; ' but a hen who has already hatched a brood can hardly be assumed to sit with perfect ' blindness ' on her second nest. Some expectation of consequences must in every case like this be aroused ; and this expectation, according as it is that of something desired or of something disliked, must necessarily either re-enforce or inhibit the mere impulse. The hen's idea of the chickens would probably encourage her to sit ; a rat's memory, on the other hand, of a former escape from a trap would neutralize his impulse to take bait from anything that reminded him of that trap. If a boy sees a fat hopping-toad, he probably has incontinently an impulse (especially if with other boys) to smash the creature with a stone, which impulse we may suppose him blindly to obey.

But something in the expression of the dying toad's clasped hands suggests the meanness of the act, or reminds him of sayings he has heard about the sufferings of animals being like his own ; so that, when next he is tempted by a toad, an idea arises which, far from spurring him again to the torment, prompts kindly actions, and may even make him the toad's champion against less reflecting boys. It is plain, then, that, no matter how well endoioed, an animal may originally be in the way of instincts, his resultant actions loill be much modified if the instincts combine, ivith experience, if in addition to impulses he have memories, associations, inferences, and expectations, on any considerable scale. An

object O, on which he has an instinctive impulse to react in the manner A, would directly provoke him to that reaction. But O has meantime become for him a sign of the nearness of P, on which he has an equally strong impulse to react in the manner B, quite unlike A. So that when he meets O the immediate impulse A and the remote impulse B struggle in his breast for the mastery. The fatality and uniformity said to be characteristic of instinctive actions will be so little manifest that one might be tempted to deny to him altogether the possession of any instinct about the object O. Yet how false this judgment would be ! The instinct about O is there ; only by the complication of the associative machinery it has come into conflict with another instinct about P.

Here we immediately reap the good fruits of our simple physiological conception of what an instinct is. If it be a mere excito-motor impulse, due to the pre-existence of a certain * reflex arc ' in the nerve-centres of the creature, of course it must follow the law of all such reflex arcs. One liability of such arcs is to have their activity * inhibited,' by other processes going on at the same time. It makes no difference whether the arc be organized at birth, or ripen spontaneously later, or be due to acquired habit, it must take its chances with all the other arcs, and sometimes succeed, and sometimes fail, in drafting off the currents through itself. The mystical view of an instinct would make it invariable. The physiological view would require it to show occasional irregularities in any animal in whom the number of separate instincts, and the possible entrance of the same stimulus into several of them, were great. And such irregularities are what every superior animal's instincts do show in abundance."^

* In the instincts of mammals, and even of lower creatures, the uniformity and infallibility which, a generation ago, were considered as essential characters do not exist. The minuter study of recent years has found continuity, transition, variation, and mistake, wherever it has looked for them, and decided that what is called an instinct is usually only a tendency to act in a way of which .the average is pretty constant, but which need not be mathematically 'true.' Cf. on this point Darwin's Origin of Species: Romanes's Mental Evol., chaps, xi to xvi inch, and Appendix; W. L. Lindsay's Mind in Lower Animals, vol. i. 133-141 ; u. chaps, v, XX /

Wherever the mind is elevated enough to discriminate ; wherever several distinct sensory elements must combine to discharge the reflex-arc ; wherever, instead of plumping into action instantly at the first rough intimation of what sort of a thing is there, the agent waits to see which one of its kind it is and what the circumstances are of its appearance; wherever different individuals and different circumstances can impel him in different ways ; wherever these are the conditions — we have a masking of the elementary constitution of the instinctive life. The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is the history of our taking advantage of the way in which they judge of everything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill them. Nature, in them, has left matters in this rough way, and made them act ahvays in the manner which would be oftenest right. There are more worms unattached to hooks than impaled upon them ; therefore, on the whole, says Nature to her fishy children, bite at every worm and take your chances. But as her children get higher, and their lives more precious, she reduces the risks. Since what seems to be the same object may be now a genuine food and now a bait ; since in gregarious species each individual may prove to be either the friend or the rival, according to the circumstances, of another ; since any entirely unknown object may be fraught with weal or woe. Nature implants contrary impulses to act on many classes of things, and leaves it to slight alterations in the conditions of the individual case to decide which impulse shall carry the day. Thus, greediness and suspicion, curiosity and timidity, coyness and desire, bashfulness and vanity, sociability and pugnacity, seem to shoot over into each other as quickly, and to remain in as unstable equilibrium, in the higher birds and mammals as in man.

They are all impulses, congenital, blind at first, and productive of motor reactions of a rigorously determinate sort. Each one of them, then, is an instinct, as instincts are commonly defined. But they contradict each other — * experience ' in each particular oppor- and K. Semper's Conditions of Existence in Animals, where a great many instances will be found. tunity of application usually deciding the issue. The animal that exhibits them loses the * instinctive ' demeanor and appears to lead a life of hesitation and choice, an intellectual life ; not J however, because he has no instincts — rather because he has so many that they block each other's path.

Thus, then, without troubling ourselves about the words instinct and reason, we may confidently say that however uncertain man's reactions upon his environment may sometimes seem in comparison with those of lower creatures, the uncertainty is probably not due to their possession of any principles of action which he lacks. On the contrary, man possesses all the impulses that they have, and a great many more besides. In other words, there is no material antagonism between instinct and reason. Reason, per se, can inhibit no impulses ; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may, however, make an inference ivhich ivill excite the imagination so as to set loose the impulse the other way ; and thus, though the animal richest in reason might be also the animal richest in instinctive impulses too, he would never seem the fatal automaton which a merely instinctive animal would be^

Let us now turn to human impulses with a little more detail. All we have ascertained so far is that impulses of an originally instinctive character may exist, and yet not betray themselves by automatic fatality of conduct. But in man what impulses do exist? In the light of what has been said, it is obvious that an existing impulse may not always be superficially apparent even when its object is there. And we shall see that some impulses may be masked by causes of which we have not yet spoken.

Were one devising an abstract scheme, nothing would be easier than to discover from an animal's actions just how many instincts he possessed. He would react in one way only upon each class of objects with which his life had to deal ; he would react in identically the same way iipon every specimen of a class ; and he would react invariably during his whole life. There would be no gaps among hii Instincts ; all would come to light without perversion oi disguise. But there are no such abstract animals, and nowhere does the instinctive life display itself in such a way. Not only, as we have seen, may objects of the same class ftrouse reactions of opposite sorts in consequence of slight changes in the circumstances, in the individual object, or in the agent's inward condition ; but two other principles of which we have not yet spoken, may come into play and produce results so striking that observers as eminent as Messrs. D. A. Spalding and Komanes do not hesitate to call them 'derangements of the mental constitution,' and to conclude that the instinctive machinery has got out of gear.

Taken in conjunction with the two former principles— that the same object may excite ambiguous impulses, or suggest an impulse different from that which it excites^ by sug^ gesting a remote object — they explain any amount of departure from uniformity of conduct, without implying any getting out of gear of the elementary impulses from which the conduct flows. 1. The law of inhibition of instincts by habits is this : When objects of a certain doss elicit from an animal a certain sort of reojction, it often happens that the animal becomes partial to the first specimen of the class on which it has reacted^ and tuill not afterward react on any other specimen.

The selection of a particular hole to live in, of a particular mate, of a particular feeding-ground, a particular variety of diet, a particular anything, in short, out of a possible multitude, is a very wide-spread tendency among animals, even those low down in the scale. The limpet will return to the same stickingplace in its rock, and the lobster to its favorite nook on the sea-bottom. The rabbit will deposit its dung in the same corner ; the bird makes its nest on the same bough. But each of these preferences carries with it an insensibility to other opportunities and occasions — an insensibility which can only be described physiologically as an inhibition oi

new impulses by the habit of old ones already formed The possession of homes and wives of our own makes us strangely insensible to the charms of those of other people. Few of us are adventurous in the matter of food ; in fact, most of us think there is something disgusting in a bill of fare to which we are unused. Strangers, we are apt to think, cannot be worth knowing, especially if they come from distant cities, etc. The original impulse which got us homes, wives, dietaries, and friends at all, seems to exhaust itself in its first achievements and to leave no surplus energy for reacting on new cases. And so it comes about that, witnessing this torpor, an observer of mankind might say that no instinctive propensity toward certain objects existed at all. It existed, but it existed miscellaneously , or as an instinct pure and simple, only before habit was formed. A habit, once grafted on an instinctive tendency, restricts the range of the tendency itself, and keeps us from reacting on any but the habitual object, although other objects might just as well have been chosen had they been the firstcomers.

Another sort of arrest of instinct by habit is where the 3ame class of objects awakens contrary instinctive impulses. Here the impulse first followed toward a given individual of the class is apt to keep him from ever awakening the opposite impulse in us. In fact, the whole class may be protected by this individual specimen from the application to it of the other impulse. Animals, for example, awaken in a child the opposite impulses of fearing and fondling. But if a child, in his first attempts to pat a dog, gets snapped at or bitten, so that the impulse of fear is strongly aroused, it may be that for years to come no dog will excite in him the impulse to fondle again. On the other hand, the greatest natural enemies, if carefully introduced to each other when young and guided at the outset by superior authority, settle down into those * happy families ' of friends which we see in our menageries. Young animals, immediately after birth, have no instinct of fear, but show their dependence by allowing themselves to be freely handled. Later, however, they grow 'wild/ and, if left to themselves, will not let man approach them. I am told by farmers in the

Adirondack wilderness that it is a very serious matter if a cow wanders off and calves in the woods and is not found for a week or more. The calf, by that time, is as wild and almost as fleet as a deer, and hard to capture without violence. But calves rarely show any particular wildness to the men who have been in contact with them during the first days of their life, when the instinct to attach themselves is uppermost, nor do they dread strangers as they would if brought up wild.

Chickens give a curious illustration of the same law. Mr. Spalding's wonderful article on instinct shall supply us with the facts. These little creatures show opposite instincts of attachment and fear, either of which may be aroused by the same object, man. If a chick is born in the absence of the hen, it "will follow any moving object. And, when guided by sight alone, they seem to have no more disposition to follow a hen than to follow a duck or a human being. Unreflecting lookers-on, when they saw chickens a day old running after me," says Mr. Spalding, "and older ones following me for miles, and answering to my whistle, imagined that I must have some occult power over the creatures : whereas I had simply allowed them to follow me from the first. There is the instinct to follow; and the ear, prior to experience, attaches them to the right object." *

But if a man presents himself for the first time when the instinct of fear is strong, the phenomena are altogether reversed. Mr. Spalding kept three chickens hooded until they were nearly four days old, and thus describes their behavior : " Each of them, on being unhooded, evinced the greatest terror to me, dashing off in the opposite direction whenever I sought to approach it. The table on which they were unhooded stood before a window, and each in its turn beat against the window like a wild bird. One of them darted behind some books, and, squeezing itself into a corner, remained cowering for a length of time. We might guess at the meaning of this strange and exceptional wildness ; but the odd fact is enough for my present purpose. Whatever might have been the meaning of this marked change in their mental constitution — had they been unhooded on the previous day they would have run to me instead of from me — it could not have been the effect of experience ; it must have resulted wholly from changes in their own organizations." f