other innate emotional tendencies. McDougall, using as his criteria the presence of each in the higher animals and the possession by each of a distinct pathological history in human beings, has distinguished eleven primary instincts,[1] each with a specific mode of behavior. Sympathy, suggestion, imitation, and play are modes in which instincts interact, rather than distinct functional units; but like the latter they are innate dispositions. Each instinct possesses afferent and motor channels in the nervous system that are to some extent modifiable, while the central portions, the conative element and the emotion, are unchanging. Thus many of us learn not to feel afraid in the dark, and so to suppress innate afferent channels, while we become afraid of new objects, which indicates that new afferent channels have been opened. Likewise we may, through habit formation, acquire new modes of behavior when we feel fear in addition to those innately organized. Further, I should add—I do not know whether McDougall would accept this—there may be several innate or acquired motor channels to the same instinct and central emotion—e.g., that of fear possessing flight and concealment among others—and when the instinct is aroused there may be, in man at least, more or less conscious choice as to the mode of behavior in which the instinct shall find its expression.[2] But greatly as the occasions that call forth these instincts and the modes of expression which they assume may be modified in the course of a human life, their central conative and emotional elements remain unaltered. Fear is fear and anger is anger, as unique impulsive and emotional experiences whenever we are under their influence. Carefully to be distinguished from these innate and centrally unmodifiable psycho-physical dispositions
- ↑ Flight with the emotion of fear; pugnacity with the emotion of anger; repulsion with the emotion of disgust; curiosity with the emotion of wonder; self-abasement with subjection; self-assertion with elation; and the reproductive, gregarious, acquisitive, constructive and food-seeking instincts whose emotions have not received names. I shall in this paper use indifferently the name either of the instinct or its attending emotion to express both, except when they need to be distinguished for the purposes of this paper.
- ↑ I am here speaking on my own initiative, and do not wish to attribute these statements to McDougall, although I hope that he will approve of them. This addition seems to me to meet a criticism of Shand's successfully.
