[§ 47]. The Two Sides of Instinct.—If instinct is the general name for the innate nervous tendencies to behaviour, then the detailed study of instinct belongs to physiology and general biology. The psychologist is concerned with it only in so far as the innate tendencies guide and form the stream of thought. There is, however, another side to instinct, which makes it a matter of direct psychological observation; the touching-off of an instinctive response may be accompanied by mental processes, by sensations and feeling. We must say something of instinct in both relations; and we look at it, first, from the biological point of view.
The list of instincts given on pp. 205 ff. includes tendencies of very different kinds, simple and complex, variable and constant. Sweeping statements are therefore dangerous; we must be careful to guard our generalisations by giving instances. That premised, we note, to begin with, that the innate tendencies are rarely perfect, completely ready for action, at birth; they ripen as the organism developes. The child does not learn to walk, or the bird to fly, in any strict sense of the word ‘learn’; the innate tendencies settle to their perfect work as time goes on. We note, secondly, that the tendencies may ripen at very different levels of individual development; the culmination of sex-interest at adolescence, the appearance of bashfulness in the child of three or four years, the lack of fear in the new-born babe, are cases in point. Thirdly, they are extraordinarily persistent. Our instincts, no doubt, wax and wane; but they change far less than their outward expression would indicate. The boy, we say, goes through the collecting stage, and therewith an end; but do not grown men too collect, if they have time and money? The little girl with her doll is the later mother with her child; and the play of the child persists in the technical play of the gambler and the experimental essays of the man of science. Fourthly, they are by no means harmonious among themselves. In many animals the instinct to crouch motionless conflicts with the instinct to flee from the object of fear, and you may see them obeying now the one and now the other. Curiosity conflicts with alarm: watch a young child on its first introduction to a dog or a beetle! The sparrow is at once audacious and cautious, bold and timid; and every human adult—despite the song in Iolanthe—is both conservative and radical. Fifthly, they are looser, have (so to say) a greater freedom of play, than is commonly supposed; and this in two directions; the same response may be touched off by situations that have only a general resemblance; and, conversely, situations that seem to be identical may touch off responses that show a good deal of difference. In briefer statement, like stimuli may call out the same response: we smile from happiness or from superiority; and the same stimulus repeated may call out responses that are hardly even like: the extreme case is, perhaps, our crying or laughing for joy. Sixthly, they are liable to be checked, turned aside, inhibited, by acquired nervous tendencies; habit is not only second nature, but may also overcome nature. A chick pecks at an humble-bee, and pays the penalty; thereafter it rejects yolk of egg. A pike in an aquarium, separated from minnows by a glass screen, struck repeatedly at its natural prey and bumped its head; when the screen was removed, the minnows were left undisturbed. If a sheet of glass is placed before the eyes, and a rubber-tipped hammer springs up and hits it, you wink, perhaps, for the first hundred times; but you can presently inhibit the wink. This liability to inhibition is, of course, more obvious in the case of the more complex tendencies. Seventhly, they are liable to specialisation. A bird builds its nest in a certain suitable place; and then, though the site may become increasingly dangerous and exposed, persists in building there again, year after year. The routes that various birds follow in their migratory flight south and north show the same kind of specialised set. Eighthly and lastly, the more complicated tendencies may, especially in the case of man, be broken up into partial tendencies; and these partial tendencies may then form connections of the most varied sort with acquired tendencies. A father strikes a blow in defence of his child: love and hate and possibly fear are involved; if the deed is done in public, such social instincts as love of approbation and fear of ridicule may come in; all these instincts are concerned, and yet the father would give you his reasons for the blow! Civilised man, we said, always ‘reasons’ on the basis of his instinctive tendencies; we had better have said that he reasons on the basis of various fragments of instinctive tendency, disjoined from their original connections and recombined for an immediate purpose.
So much for the biological side of instinct. We have no space for a longer treatment; though, indeed, if you go to the larger works, you will find little more that is definite and firmly established; the detailed study of the innate tendencies has hardly begun. If we turn now to the mental accompaniments of instinctive response, we find ourselves in even worse case; we know practically nothing. It is clear that some of the more limited responses have a characteristic mental correlate—think of coughing, sneezing, smiling—which may, however, according to circumstances, be either vivid or so obscure as to escape notice. It is clear, again, that the empathic tendencies are likely to be characterised by more or less massive complexes of organic sensation; and it is perhaps true that this organic surge represents the mental aspect of the instincts proper, those that pass over into emotions; for they are responses or reactions of the whole organism, and not of some particular organ or member. Most of the large directive pressures, that we placed at the upper end of the scale, show themselves rather in the volume and trend of the mental stream than in the addition of new processes, though it is quite possible that they imply specific bodily attitudes, and arouse specific patterns of kinæsthesis in head or eyes, from breathing or from the muscular set of the trunk. We all know how it feels to be critically on guard against deception; but is there not, sometimes at any rate, a felt attitude of acceptance, of credulity? could we not, sometimes, after the serious-faced jester has played his trick upon us, feel ourselves back into our credulous attitude? We all know, again, how disconcerting it is to be faced by a third possibility when we have comfortably reduced things to a choice of alternatives; but can we not, now and then, catch ourselves in a felt attitude of dividing by two? Let the reader keep an eye on his own experiences! Lastly, a response that is often repeated will illustrate the psychological law of growth and decay (p. 183); the organic and kinæsthetic sensations will be supplemented by images, which will increase up to a certain point, and thereafter fall away. Fear of the dark is one instance; the use and disuse of terms of endearment offer another.
As regards feeling, we can only say that all six types of sense-feeling—the agreeable and disagreeable, the exciting and subduing, the straining and relaxing—may appear in connection with instinctive responses, and especially with those that we have placed in the middle portion of the scale. Such words as fear, pugnacity, rivalry, carry the stamp of feeling upon them.
[§ 48]. Determining Tendencies.—The reader must have felt for some time past that we sorely need a technical term for all the directive nerve-forces, brain-habits, instinctive tendencies, and so forth, that figure in psychological discussion. There is such a term, formed on the analogy of ‘associative tendencies’; psychologists are coming more and more to speak of determining tendencies. Any nervous set or disposition that turns our attention in a certain direction, that casts our perceptions into a certain form, that places a definite meaning upon an equivocal word, that governs our response to a particular situation, may be called a determining tendency. Some of these tendencies are simple, and some are extremely complex; some are inherited, and some are acquired in the life-time of the individual. All alike lay down a path of least resistance for the psychoneural processes (p. 164) to follow, and thus determine the flow of the mental stream.
Why, then, has not the term been introduced before? would not its use have simplified things, have brought the different topics together, have saved a good deal of roundabout phrasing? No doubt. But there are two dangers in the use of such a technical term. The one is that you think merely the words themselves, and do not carry your thought back to the nervous system. A determining tendency is an affair not of mind but of body; and if we had used the words from the outset, you might easily have slipped into the belief that there are determining tendencies in the mind, and might thus have left the nervous system out of account. Have you not—to be honest!—thought and spoken of your ‘bodily sensations’ ever since you studied the chapter on sensation? Yet there are no physical or bodily sensations, any more than there are mental determining tendencies; the bodily processes correlated with sensation are not the sensation, and the mental flow correlated with a nervous tendency is not that tendency. The second danger is that you look upon the technical term as self-explanatory; so that, just as popular psychology explains the conduct of the lower animals by ‘instinct,’ without ever asking what instinct is or how it explains, you too explain certain mental phenomena by ‘determining tendency,’ forgetting that the work of correlation is still all to do. New terms bring these risks, that you put the word in place of the facts and confuse a label with an explanation; but they are also inevitable, when new observations accumulate; and this particular term should now be as harmless as it is necessary.
We shall meet the determining tendencies again, when we come to deal with action and thought. Meantime let us note that they furnish a definition of that rather obscure word ‘suggestion.’ A suggestion is something that comes to us with more or less of the force of a command; but what does this ‘force of a command’ mean? Our new technical term helps us: a suggestion is any stimulus to nervous activity, external or internal, with or without mental accompaniment, that touches off a determining tendency. The determining tendency may be realised, or may be inhibited, as circumstances decide; the essence of a suggestion is, always and everywhere, that it releases such a tendency. Thus, the psychological observer of whom we spoke on p. 96 received from the experimenter certain instructions; these instructions were obeyed, that is, they were effective suggestions. What, now, set up the determining tendency to follow instructions? A foregone suggestion: the student came into the laboratory to observe, to be taught, to put himself under direction. What brought him into the laboratory? Another foregone suggestion: the wish to learn psychology at first hand, the example of his friends. What led him to choose at the university the course that includes psychology? What led him to choose this particular university? What led him to enter any university? All these results are due to suggestions, which grow in number and complexity the farther back we go; and the force of the suggestions, in every case, is their appeal to determining tendencies. A nervous system that lacked these tendencies would furnish its possessor with connections that were all, so to speak, on the same plane; the organism could neither lead nor follow, neither choose nor reject, neither work nor play; it would not be suggestible.
From this digression we pass to the study of emotion, which, as we have seen, is closely related to the instincts of the middle part of our scale.
[§ 49]. The Nature of Emotion.—Suppose that you are sitting at your desk, busy in your regular way; and suppose that a street-car passes by the house. The familiar rumble does not distract you; it slips in among the obscure processes of the margin. Suddenly you hear a shrill scream; and now the noise of the car shoots to the focus of attention, becomes the context of the scream. You leap up, as if the scream were a personal signal that you had been expecting; you dash out of doors, as if your presence on the street were imperatively necessary. As you run, you have fragmentary ideas: ‘a child,’ perhaps, in internal speech; a visual flash of some previous accident; a momentary kinæsthetic set, the stiffening of protest, that represents your whole attitude to the city car-system. But you have, also, a mass of insistent organic sensation: you choke, you draw your breath in gasps, for all the hurry you are in a cold sweat, you have a horrible nausea; and yet, in spite of the intense discomfort that floods you, you have no choice but to go on. In describing the experience later, you would say that you were horrified by hearing a child scream; the mental processes that we have just named make up the emotion of horror.
An emotion is thus a temporal experience, a course of connected processes; it begins, in our illustration, with the empathic perception of the scream, and lasts through and beyond the events that we have described; indeed, the last traces of the horror may not wear off for days. It is also, characteristically, a suddenly aroused experience; it begins abruptly, though it dies down gradually; the accident comes upon you all at once, and drives everything else out of mind. It is highly complex, since its stimulus is not a single object, a perceptive stimulus, but a total situation or predicament, which may arouse all sorts of ideas. It is coloured through and through by feeling, since both the situation itself and the organic sensations of the emotive response are definitely pleasant or unpleasant. It is, at any rate in its more intense phases, insistently organic; we took the testimony of language on p. 65, and you can easily add to the instances there cited; though it must be said also that the proportion of organic sensations to ideas varies greatly from emotion to emotion and from individual to individual. Finally, it is always a predetermined experience, issuing from determining tendencies and moving forward, in the given case, to a natural end; though here, too, there is great variability, since the determining tendencies to which the situation makes appeal may be almost wholly instinctive, or may (as in the illustration we have chosen) be partly instinctive and partly acquired.