The Foundations of Personality [44]
teaching and without the possibility of previous experience. Since the parent never sees the progeny, and the progeny assume various shapes and have very varied capacities at these times, there can be no possible teaching of what is remarkably skillful and marvelously adapted conduct.[1] [1] The nature of instinct has been a subject of discussion for centuries, but it is only within the last fifty years or thereabouts that instinctive actions have really been studied. I refer the reader to the works of Darwin, Romanes, Lloyd Morgan, the Peckhams, Fabre, Hobhouse, and McDougall for details as to the controversies and the facts obtained.
Herbert Spencer considered the instinct as a series of inevitable reflexes. The carrion fly, when gravid, deposits her eggs in putrid meat in order that the larvae may have appropriate food, although she never sees the larvae or cannot know through experience their needs. "The smell of putrid meat attracts the gravid carrion fly. That is, it sets up motions of the wings which bring the fly to it, and the fly having arrived, the smell, and the contact combined stimulate the functions of oviposition."[1] But as all the critics have pointed out, the theory of compound reflex action leaves out of account that there are any number of stimuli pouring in on the carrion fly at the same time that the meat attracts her. The real mystery lies in that internal condition which makes the smell of the meat act so inevitably. [1] Hobhouse.
In fact, it is this internal condition in the living creature that is the most important single link in instinct. In the non-mating season the sight of the female has no effect on the male. But periodically his internal organs become tense with procreative cells; these change his coenaesthesia; that starts desire, and desire sets going the mechanisms of search, courtship, the sexual act and the care of the female while she is gravid. All instinctive acts have back of them either a tension or a deficit of some kind or other, brought about by the awakening of function of some glandular structure, so that the organism becomes ready to respond to some appropriate outside stimulus and inaccessible to others. During the mating season, with certain animals, the stimulus of food has no effect until there is effected the purposes of the sexual hunger. Changes in the body due to the activity of sex glands or gastric juices or any other organic product have two effects. They increase the stimulation that comes from the thing sought and decrease the stimulation that comes from other things. In physiological language, the threshold for the first is lowered and for the other it is raised. But this does not explain HOW the changes in glands MAKE the animal seek this or that, except by saying that the animal has hereditary structures all primed to explode in the right way. We may fall back on Bergson's mystical idea that all life is a unity, and that instinct, which makes one living thing know what to do with another--to kill it in a scientific way for the good of the posterity of the killer--is merely the knowledge, unconscious, that life has of life. That pleasant explanation projects us back to a darker problem than ever: how life knows life and why one part of life so obviously seeks to circumvent the purpose of another part of life. For us it is best to say that instinct arises out of the racial and individual needs; that physically there occur changes in the glands and tissues; that these set up desires which arouse into action simple or elaborate mechanisms which finally satisfy the need of the organs and tissues.[1] [1] Kempf in his book on the vegetative nervous system goes into great detail the way the visceral needs force the animal or human to satisfy them. Life is a sort of war between the vegetative and the central nervous system. There is just enough truth in this point of view to make it very entertaining.
Even in the low forms of life instincts are not perfect at the start, or perfect in details, and almost every member of a species will show individuality in
Herbert Spencer considered the instinct as a series of inevitable reflexes. The carrion fly, when gravid, deposits her eggs in putrid meat in order that the larvae may have appropriate food, although she never sees the larvae or cannot know through experience their needs. "The smell of putrid meat attracts the gravid carrion fly. That is, it sets up motions of the wings which bring the fly to it, and the fly having arrived, the smell, and the contact combined stimulate the functions of oviposition."[1] But as all the critics have pointed out, the theory of compound reflex action leaves out of account that there are any number of stimuli pouring in on the carrion fly at the same time that the meat attracts her. The real mystery lies in that internal condition which makes the smell of the meat act so inevitably. [1] Hobhouse.
In fact, it is this internal condition in the living creature that is the most important single link in instinct. In the non-mating season the sight of the female has no effect on the male. But periodically his internal organs become tense with procreative cells; these change his coenaesthesia; that starts desire, and desire sets going the mechanisms of search, courtship, the sexual act and the care of the female while she is gravid. All instinctive acts have back of them either a tension or a deficit of some kind or other, brought about by the awakening of function of some glandular structure, so that the organism becomes ready to respond to some appropriate outside stimulus and inaccessible to others. During the mating season, with certain animals, the stimulus of food has no effect until there is effected the purposes of the sexual hunger. Changes in the body due to the activity of sex glands or gastric juices or any other organic product have two effects. They increase the stimulation that comes from the thing sought and decrease the stimulation that comes from other things. In physiological language, the threshold for the first is lowered and for the other it is raised. But this does not explain HOW the changes in glands MAKE the animal seek this or that, except by saying that the animal has hereditary structures all primed to explode in the right way. We may fall back on Bergson's mystical idea that all life is a unity, and that instinct, which makes one living thing know what to do with another--to kill it in a scientific way for the good of the posterity of the killer--is merely the knowledge, unconscious, that life has of life. That pleasant explanation projects us back to a darker problem than ever: how life knows life and why one part of life so obviously seeks to circumvent the purpose of another part of life. For us it is best to say that instinct arises out of the racial and individual needs; that physically there occur changes in the glands and tissues; that these set up desires which arouse into action simple or elaborate mechanisms which finally satisfy the need of the organs and tissues.[1] [1] Kempf in his book on the vegetative nervous system goes into great detail the way the visceral needs force the animal or human to satisfy them. Life is a sort of war between the vegetative and the central nervous system. There is just enough truth in this point of view to make it very entertaining.
Even in the low forms of life instincts are not perfect at the start, or perfect in details, and almost every member of a species will show individuality in