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This little book is an admirable critique of the Concept of instinct as used in psychology, in ethics, and in social philosophy generally. The thesis of the author briefly—briefly because inadequately expressed—is about
as follows: The use of the concept “instinct” is inaccurate, misleading, and interferes with progress in thought and discovery in science. The concept of instinct has come to be used not unlike the way in which the savage used the concept of spirits. Primitive man, in his animistic way of thought, attributed everything that happened to a spirit, and so by a process of refinement and resymbolization we have come at this day and age to speak of instincts and forces as the causative factors behind events. The author very properly cautions against this way of using such terms, for after all they do not go much further in the way of explanation than the savage spirits.
The implication here is that thinking in terms of instincts and forces as the agencies of activity is in every way analogous to the savages' thinking of spirits as explaining activity and that whereas there has been an uninterrupted series of links between the savages' concept of spirits and the twentieth century concept of instinct that it is merely a change of terms without real progress. This implication is possible from the book, although the author does not state it in so many words, and probably would not agree to it because it would be an unfortunate implication and an untrue one. Whereas the concept of spirits on the one hand and instinct on the other are analogous, in fact closely analogous, and whereas the mental mechanisms which have produced the one concept may be the same as those which produced the other, still the advance from the concept spirits to the concept instinct has been a true advance, because all along the line with the reformations and the resymbolizations there has gone hand in hand new points of view, new uncovering of material, new assembling of facts,—better t