A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

[CHAPTER VIII]

Instinct and Emotion

Ie considere que, dés le premier moment que nostre ame a esté iointe au corps, il est vray-semblable qu’elle a senty de la ioye, & incontinent aprés de l’amour, puis peut-estre aussi de la haine, & de la tristesse; & que les mesmes dispositions du corps, qui out pour lors causé en elles ces passions, en out naturellement par aprés acompagné les pensées.—René Descartes

§ 46. The Nature of Instinct.—We left the sense-feelings a long time ago (§ 18), though we have made occasional reference to them and to emotion in recent paragraphs. Now we return to the feeling-side of mind; but we must begin with an account of instinct, which is related both to emotion and to action.

Instinct and reason are familiar catch-words of popular psychology. Animals are said to act ‘on instinct,’ while man, at any rate in his specifically human capacity, acts ‘by reason.’ The terms, as thus used, are not descriptive but explanatory. Just as a mental connection is supposed to be explained by similarity or contiguity of ideas (p. 146), so a particular activity or performance is supposed to be explained when we have labelled it ‘instinctive’ or ‘rational.’ But what is instinct?

If we observe the behaviour of the lower animals, we find two sorts of response to stimulation: the one points to the working of an inherited nervous mechanism, the other depends upon nervous connections formed during the life-time of the individual. The second year’s bird builds the nest of its species, though it has never built a nest before; the cage-reared migrant beats its wings against the bars at the approach of winter, though it has never taken flight to the southward. Here is behaviour that we must refer to innate nervous tendencies, to the working of an inherited nervous mechanism. If, on the other hand, the parent birds come to the window-sill and take crumbs from our hand, we are in presence of behaviour of the second type. The difference, in the broad, is clear enough; only we must not press it too far. The second year’s bird, we say, builds the nest of its species; but one nest is never quite like another; something will depend upon the situation. Contrariwise, the birds would not come to the window if they had not an innate attraction to food, or a natural boldness of disposition, or a native tendency to flock with their fellows. The two sorts of behaviour can be distinguished; but they are likely to enter together, though in unequal degree, into one and the same performance.

Instinct, now, is the general name for these innate tendencies to behaviour. The word explains nothing; it is the business of science to find out what the inherited nervous mechanisms are, and how they work; but though nothing is explained, we are helped by the term toward a classification of the facts of behaviour. All of man’s conduct will be instinctive, for example, that can be shown to issue from innate nervous tendencies; and further, all of man’s conduct will be in so far instinctive as innate nervous tendencies can be shown to have a share in producing it. How large a part, then, does instinct, in this sense, play in the life of man? Not a question that can be answered offhand! For you might argue, as has been argued, that because man is the most flexible and adaptable and teachable of all animals, because he lives in all climates and thrives in the most varied conditions of life, therefore he has but few instincts. Or you might argue that, since man has undergone more change and has progressed further than any other animal; since his evolutionary history, though not longer in time, is richer in biological incident than that of the other animals; therefore he must have a great variety of instincts, or at any rate a great variety of inherited nervous mechanisms that help to guide and shape his conduct. What are the facts?

If we try to work out a rough list of human instincts, we find, at the lower end of the scale, a number of definite modes of response to particular stimuli; such things as coughing, sneezing, swallowing, smiling, threading our way in the street, beating time to music; or, in the baby, such things as sucking, clasping, biting, turning the head aside, standing, creeping, walking, crying, vocalising. At the upper end of the scale, we find gross general tendencies: the tendency to take the world of perception as a world of real things in outside space (p. 115); the empathic tendency to humanise and personalise our surroundings (p. 198); the social tendency that makes us imitative and credulous; the tendency to classify everything in pairs; the tendency to try things out, which is always at war with the tendency to let things be. These tendencies, and others of the same character, represent directive pressures laid upon the organism, more strongly upon some individuals and more weakly upon others, but in some measure upon all; they are realised or expressed on very various occasions, and with wide differences of mental accompaniment. We have spoken of some of them already; and instances may be found for the looking. Take the empathic tendency: what lover of books has not shifted the place of certain volumes on a shelf, because he could not bear to put good and bad, sound and trivial, side by side,—as if the books would feel the incongruity? Take the social tendency: we all tend to pay respect to fashion, even the silliest; we all tend to believe what we see printed in large headlines; we are all gullible, if only the cheat speaks to us in good English and appeals to our habitual standards of living. The tendency to classify by pairs shows not only in the dogmatism of uneducated persons—an action must be positively right or wrong, a man must be positively innocent or guilty—but also in the structure of systems of philosophy, in the distinctions of active-passive, subject-object, body-mind, thing-attribute, appearance-reality, and so on. The tendency to try things out is largely responsible both for the play of the child and the research of the man of science; read Andrew Lang’s story of the first radical! The tendency to let things be, the conservative tendency, is on its side largely responsible for the laziness of a life of routine.

Between these extremes lie the instincts that are so called in our ordinary speech, and that you would probably have thought of, if you had been asked to give examples of human instincts: such things as fear, love, rivalry, jealousy, pugnacity, bashfulness, self-assertion, various lines of ‘interest.’ All these names, and many like them, stand for inherited nervous dispositions which are realised or expressed in emotion. They too are differently combined, and exist in varying degree, in different individuals; and they too are common, in some measure, to all humanity.

Can we now say how man compares, in the matter of instinct, with the lower animals? James commits himself so far as to declare that “no other mammal, not even the monkey, shows so large an array.” The statement is probably true, if we mean by instinct, not a fixed and unchanging mode of response to the given stimulus or situation, but rather an equipment of innate tendencies that may form the basis of all sorts of response; an all-round readiness of behaviour, as it were, such that no stimulus or situation finds us wholly unprepared, while yet the preparation is not so narrow and definite as to force us into special and invariable response. Civilised man ‘reasons’ always on the basis of his instinctive tendencies; his ‘instincts,’ on the other hand, are in general less absorbingly possessive and less close-knit than those of lower forms of life.