Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/251

Rh definite, unpredictable and modifiable reactions, and the process evidenced in the most ideal of instinct actions, absolutely immediate, definite, unmodifiable, and predictable; that all varieties of animal activity are reducible to the instinct action form; that all of them are dependent upon structural arrangements which are innate and inherited ; that there is no evidence of any influences 'coming in' at any stage of progress to determine modification; that these influences, whatever they may be, are always present in the simplest and in the most complex of animal activities alike. III. Certain activities are controlled by intelligence, others do not effect any change in consciousness. In instinctive action there is a conscious element, 'instinct feeling.' Actions yielding instinct feelings are not our ideal instinct actions. Reflexes commonly called unconscious and complexes commonly called instinctive are more closely allied than is commonly supposed. Can we say that instinct feelings are entirely lacking in intelligent characteristics? Hardly, when we consider such ones as emotions and sentiments. Such considerations, taken with the former, point to the hypothesis that intelligence, experience and instinct feeling involves but one process, and that the psychic unit is instinct feeling, just as the biological is instinct action. In habit-formation, and ideation, in the dissolving of 'hesitancy' and 'doubt,' and even in volition, we appear to reach the description of the highest forms of intelligence in terms of instinct feeling. Even the self may be shown to be nothing more nor less than the most fundamental of all highly complex instinct feelings. The difference between instinctive and intelligent acts would appear to be one involved with an appreciation of temporal situations. IV. This conception is here correlated with the views of McDougall, Carr, Morgan, Myers, and Stout in respect to the following points: (a) innateness as a characteristic of instinct actions and intelligent actions; (b) instinct as a form of capacity; (c) the distinction between instinct actions and reflex actions, (d) the distinction between instinct and intelligence.

All intuitional philosophy makes a radical distinction in some form between intuition and discursive reason. The problem here is to determine to what extent it must appeal to dialectic and what value the latter has for it. In the first place, it must assume that being is in some general way presented to the mind, i.e., that reality is accessible. Secondly, it must prove that discursive thought is in no wise able to grasp being. But evidently the idea of being is logically anterior to all demonstration which seeks to establish the metaphysical impotence of discursive thought. It is, furthermore, hard to see how from the negation of the ontological value of discursive thought we can arrive at the conclusion that intuition is adequate. But perhaps the affirmation that reality is accessible is itself an intuition. If so, we must conclude that the intuition which grasps reality presupposes the intuition which affirms the