You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Another of the American attacks on the use of 'instinct' in psychology. The author has carried out a very considerable amount of literary research
into the various ways in which this term is employed, and has shown (as was to be expected) that the usage of different writers is extremely divergent. His own position is that instinct should be regarded as 'an inborn (in the sense of inherited) activity process which has remained intact, that is, which has not been remade through the process of learning or of making new adjustments by means of the substitution of new stimuli or responses for the old which were inherited' (p. 84). From this point of view he criticizes both the connotation and the denotation of 'instinct' as found in many other writers and has no difficulty in showing that many of the actions that these writers regard as instinctive are not innately organized but are in the nature of habits acquired through experience. In the course of this demonstration there is much interesting discussion and review of detailed points, and the reader is made to realize very vividly the extremely loose and varied way in which the term 'instinct' is currently employed. Nevertheless, as regards the main issue, this elaborate proof of the presence of acquired elements in so-called instinctive behaviour does not seem a very profitable undertaking, since the authors concerned obviously hold, explicitly or implicitly, a very different view of instinct to that adopted by Professor Bernard. The real point at issue is, surely, not so much what is inherited and what acquired as what is the relative justification and value of two very different views of instinct: (1) the narrower view which would confine the term to innately organized and unmodified simple reactions of the stimulus-response pattern and (2) the wider view according to which an instinctive tendency may seek satisfaction through a whole succession of different and often complex actions, most of which have bee