are the sentiments, which are not innate, but on the contrary arise in individual experience, are subject to intelligent control, and as I at least believe, take their form very largely through the influence of the social environment. A sentiment may be roughly defined as an organized system of different instincts and emotions about some perceived or imaged object, class of objects, or abstract ideal that calls them forth upon proper occasions. For instance, one of the most important sentiments is love, an enduring tendency to feel tender emotion whenever a given object comes to mind, to feel anger when it is attacked, fear when it is endangered, etc. Morality, art, and religion, as I at any rate believe, owe the interests that they evoke to sentiments, and are not innate except possibly in the sense that there may be some hereditary tendency for the instincts and emotions to organize themselves in these systems as a consequence of their interaction with the social environment, though I very much doubt whether even this is true to any very great extent.[1]
Logically prior to the appearance of the values themselves, and, as I believe investigation will show, also temporally prior in the development of the child and of the race, are to be found the psychological roots of the various human values in the primary instincts and other innate dispositions, chiefly in the unchanging central portions of the primary instincts. Whenever consciousness intervenes between stimulus and response the conative side of the instinct will be present in consciousness as a definite impulse in some direction. The affective side of the instinct—the emotion—may not be prominent unless the instinct is checked or thwarted in some manner as it seeks expression; in which case the emotion will appear, its function being to reinforce the conative impulse. If, in response to the stimulus, there is serious conflict within the instinct as to which of two modes of behavior shall be followed—e.g., flight or concealment—or if there is conflict between two instincts—e.g., fear and curiosity—
- ↑ We must remember that man has been civilized only a few thousand of the many thousands of years of his life upon the earth, and that during this time no biological changes have occurred in him, while his sentiments have varied enormously in every clime and with every civilization. They can hardly be innate in a biological sense.
