[7] It is of course only as physiological traits that the tropisms are conceived not to overlap, blend or interfere, and it is likewise only in respect of their physiological discontinuity that the like argument would bear on the instincts. In respect of their expression, in the way of orientation, movement, growth, secretion, and the like, the tropismatic response to dissimilar stimuli is often so apparently identical that expert investigators have at times been at a loss to decide to which one of two or several recognised tropismatic sensibilities a given motor response should be ascribed. But in respect of their ultimate physiological character, the intimate physiological process by which the given sensibility takes effect, the response due to different tropismatic sensibilities appears in each case to be distinctive and not to blend with any other response to a different stimulus, with which it may happen to synchronise.
[8] Cf., e. g., McDougall, Introduction to Social Psychology, ch. i-iii.
[9] Cf., e. g., Otto Ammon, Die Gesellschaftsordnung; G. Vacher de Lapouge, Les sélections sociales, and Race et milieu social, especially “Lois fondamentales de l’Anthroposociologie.”
[10] The all-pervading modern institution of private property appears to have been of such an origin, having cumulatively grown out of the self-regarding bias of men in their oversight of the community’s material interests.
[11] Cf. McDougall, Social Psychology, ch. x.
[12] Latterly the question of instincts has been a subject of somewhat extensive discussion among students of animal behaviour, and throughout this discussion the argument has commonly been conducted on neurological, or at the most on physiological ground. This line of argument is well and lucidly presented in a volume recently published (The Science of Human Behavior, New York, 1913) by Mr. Maurice Parmalee. The book offers an incisive critical discussion of the Nature of Instinct (ch. xi) with a specific reference to the instinct of workmanship (p. 252). The discussion runs, faithfully and competently, on neurological ground and reaches the outcome to be expected in an endeavour to reduce instinct to neurological (or physiological) terms. As has commonly been true of similar endeavours, the outcome is essentially negative, in that “instinct” is not so much explained as explained away. The reason of this outcome is sufficiently evident; “instinct,” being not a neurological or physiological concept, is not statable in neurological or physiological terms. The instinct of workmanship no more than any other instinctive proclivity is an isolable, discrete neural function; which, however, does not touch the question of its status as a psychological element. The effect of such an analysis as is offered by Mr. Parmalee is not to give terminological precision to the concept of “instinct” in the sense assigned it in current usage, but to dispense with it; which is an untoward move in that it deprives the student of the free use of this familiar term in its familiar sense and therefore constrains him to bring the indispensable concept of instinct in again surreptitiously under cover of some unfamiliar term or some terminological circumlocution. The current mechanistic analyses of animal behaviour are of great and undoubted value to any inquiry into human conduct, but their value does not lie in an attempt to make them supersede those psychological phenomena which it is their purpose to explain. That such supersession of psychological phenomena by the mechanistic formulations need nowise follow and need not be entertained appears, e. g., in such work as that of Mr. Loeb, referred to above, Comparative Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology.
[13] Endless in the sense that the effects of such concatenation do not run to a final term in any direction.
[14] Many students of animal behaviour are still, as psychologists generally once were, inclined to contrast instinct with intelligence, and to confine the term typically to such automatically determinate action as takes effect without deliberation or intelligent oversight. This view would appear to be a remnant of an earlier theoretical position, according to which all the functions of intelligence were referred to a distinct immaterial entity, entelechy, associated in symbiosis with the physical organism. If all such preconceptions of a substantial dichotomy between physiological and psychological activity be abandoned it becomes a matter of course that intellectual functions themselves take effect only on the initiative of the instinctive dispositions and under their surveillance, and the antithesis between instinct and intelligence will consequently fall away. What expedients of terminology and discrimination may then be resorted to in the study of those animal instincts that involve a minimum of intellect is of course a question for the comparative psychologists. Cf., for instance, C. Lloyd Morgan, Introduction to Comparative Psychology (2nd edition, 1906) ch. xii, especially pp. 206–209, and Habit and Instinct, ch. i and vi.
[15] Cf. H. S. Jennings, Behavior of the Lower Animals, ch. xii, xx, xxi.
[16] See McDougall, Introduction to Social Psychology, ch. iii and x.