Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/86

 70 ALICE JULIA HAMLIN : AN ATTEMPT, ETC. (whatever this may prove on analysis to be) of which the organism is capable. If migrating birds are imprisoned in the autumn, they beat against the southern side of the cage with extreme force and persistence. It seems absurd to suppose that there is no conscious prompting to these efforts. Neither can such a hypothesis account for the very frequent modification of instinctive action by intelligence. It is true that the prompting to activity becomes more and more obscure as we pass down the scale of animal life. Yet if Wundt is right in regarding impulse, or a consciously active response to the environment, as the fundamental characteristic of animal life, then the conative element must be present in even the lowest forms of instinctive action. Whatever one's attitude towards Wundt's primary assumption, his discussion of instinct, as the preceding quotations must already have indicated, is by far the most thorough and complete. Writing from the strictly psycho- logical standpoint, he has taken up important points ignored by others, and is guilty of no confusion of biological inter- pretation with psychological analysis. His conclusions are in substantial agreement with the formula here given. Uniting the elements noticed above, our formula will stand as sAG; or, if emotion is present, as s [SAc]C. For the psychologist, that is, instinct is a conscious complex in which the perceptual elements are more or less obscured by the strong affective tone of the mental state and by the impulse to activities which the animal performs without consciousness of their end, and by means of a mechanism provided by its physical organisation.