Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/80

64 ALICE JULIA HAMLIX : pleasure and pain. Others, again, classify them as im- pulses, asserting that there is a consciousness of activity in instincts. 3. Instinct and Intelligence. The first answer demands least attention, since it finds little support at the present time. On account of the evident purposiveness of instinct, Spalding and others have thought that it must be regarded as the manifestation of inherited ideas. The great majority, how- ever, reject the theory for reasons stated by Wundt ! as follows : (1) " It is impossible to prove the existence in our own minds of any ideas which do not spring from the experience of the individual life ". (2) "The observation of instinct does not by any means give unqualified support to this hypothesis." On the one hand it offers no explanation for the frequent variations of instinct ; on the other hand, in order to account for the minute uniformities of instinct, it must assume "not only a single innate idea, but a whole connected series, in a word an innate activity of thought with a large store of experience behind it ". The question of the relation of instinct to intelligence leads us to digress for a moment into an examination of the theory of instincts as "lapsed intelligence ". We are here trespassing upon the biological domain ; but our intrusion is justified by the fact that the theory is dependent upon certain psychological assumptions in regard to the nature of animal intelligence. Lehrnami and Lewes refer all instincts to lapsed intelli- gence. Lehmann defines instinctive movements as " those excited more or less immediately, since by frequent repetition the directing ideas (always present in these movements at first) have become no longer necessary". 2 Yolkmann holds a theory which is just the reverse of this : " Instinct is an impulse arising without the presence of an idea ". 3 It comes from an affectively toned excitation grounded in organic processes. Between these extreme views stand a large number of the most important writers on the subject. They accept the theory of lapsed intelligence as a partial explanation of instincts, and especially of those observed in the higher animals. But they find it equally necessary to assume the Darwinian theory, since it covers instincts in the lower animals that are inexplicable by the alternative hypothesis. 1 Wundt's Human and Animal Psychology, tr., p. 393. 2 Lehmann' s Hauptgesetze des menschlichen Gefuhklebens, sec. 183. 3 Yolkmann's Lehrbuch der Psychologie, sec. 146.