Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/75

 IV.-AN ATTEMPT AT A PSYCHOLOGY OF INSTINCT. BY ALICE JULIA HAMLIN. IN the scientific authorities of to-day we find widely different and contradictory statements with regard to instinct. Psy- chologists of the same school often differ noticeably in the use of the term, while both the scientists of mind and of nature trespass on one another's preserves without any consciousness of being outside their own domain. There is a psychology, as well as a biology and a physiology of instinct. The proper field of the biologist is obviously the investigation of the origin and development of instincts in the race-history of any order of animals. He must estimate the influence of environments, of individual acquirements and of heredity. The physiologist must study the structural and functional basis of instinctive activity in the individual. As Hoffding says, "the original organisation of each indi- vidual is a given starting-point connecting the heritage of the race and the activity of the individual". 1 What this connexion in the organism may be, we must leave entirely to the physiologist to discover. It remains for the psycho- logist to explicate the nature of instinct in so far as it is a mental process. He must make a cross section of mind at the time when instinct becomes a conscious state. He must describe the whole mental contents or the psychical com- position of instinct. There has been little recognition of these differences in standpoint from which the three sciences regard instinct. The inevitable result of such neglect is the confusion and inconsistency present in the general treatment of the subject by even the most eminent men of the day. Attention is called to this confusion in the use of the term instinct by Pro- fessor C. Lloyd Morgan in an article in Natural Science, May, 1 Hoffding's Psychology, tr., p. 91.