A LIST OF THE NATIVE STOCK OF TENDENCIES AND OF THE EMOTIONS THAT SOMETIMES GO WITH THEM.
It would be a great mistake to suppose that instinct was important only in animal or child psychology, because the human adult governed his conduct entirely by reason and calculation of consequences. Man does not outgrow instinct, any more than he outgrows emotion. He does not outgrow the native reaction-tendencies. These primitive motives remain in force, modified and combined in various ways, but not eliminated nor even relegated to an unimportant place. Even in his most intelligent actions, the adult is animated by motives that are either plain instincts or else derivatives of the instincts. According to some of the leaders in psychology, he has no other motives than these; according to this book, as will be set forth later, there are "native likes and dislikes" (for color, tone, number, persons, etc.) to be placed beside the instincts as primary motives; but, according to either view, the instincts are extraordinarily important in the study of motivation, and a complete and accurate list of them is very much to be desired. Life is a great masquerade of the instincts, and it is not only entertaining to unmask them, but illuminating as well.
A complete account of an instinct would cover the following points: the stimulus that naturally arouses it, the end-result at which it is aimed, the preparatory reactions that occur, external and internal; and also, from the [{138}] introspective side, the conscious impulse, the peculiar emotional state (if any), and the special sort of satisfaction that comes when the end-result is reached. Further, we should know what modifications or disguises the instinct takes on in the course of experience--what new stimuli acquire the power of arousing it, what learned reactions are substituted for the native preparatory and final reactions, and what combinations occur between the instinct in question and other reaction-tendencies.
Besides all this, it would be very desirable to present convincing evidence that each instinct listed is a genuine instinct, a part of the native equipment, and not something built up by experience and training. It is rather absurd, the free and easy way in which an instinct is often assumed, simply to fit behavior which needs to be explained--a money getting instinct, for example, or a teacher-hating instinct. Since money and teachers do not exist in a state of nature, there can be no instincts specifically related to them; and it is incumbent on the psychologist to show how such acquired tendencies are derived from the native tendencies.
The full program outlined above being much too extensive to follow out completely in this chapter, we shall only mention a few salient points under each instinct. We shall try to point out the primitive behavior of the child, that reveals the instinct at its lowest terms, and give some hint also of its importance in adult behavior.
Classification
Of all the instincts, two groups or classes stand out from the rest: the responses to organic needs, and the responses to other persons. The first class includes eating, avoiding injury, and many others; the second class includes the herd instinct, the mating instinct and the parental instinct, these three and perhaps no others.
These two groups out, the rest are rather a miscellaneous collection, including the "random" or playful activity of young children, locomotion, vocalization, laughter, curiosity, rivalry and fighting. They might be named the "non-specific instincts", because the stimulus for each is not easy to specify, being sometimes another person, so that this group has great social importance, but sometimes being impersonal. This third class might also be called the "play instincts", since they are less essential than the other classes for maintaining the individual life or for propagating the species; and are, we may say, less concerned with the struggle for existence than with the joy of living.
Our classification then has three heads: