Page:Philosophical Review Volume 23.djvu/220

204 instinct to designate the ends that are accomplished, as in the parental instinct or sympathy, and lumping a large number of indefinite acts together under the one head. After weighing the advantages and disadvantages of the several theories he himself concludes: "An instinct is an inherited combination of reflexes which have been integrated by the central nervous system so as to cause an external activity of the organism which usually characterizes a whole species and is usually adaptive." Testing by this criterion the author must greatly reduce the list of human instincts as given by current writers. He does not supply a list of his own, and if taken sufficiently seriously the definition given would probably practically eliminate instincts from the list of factors of behaviorism. Reflex on the one side and intelligent action on the other might easily expand to fill the gap. Fear, sympathy, emulation, workmanship, gregariousness are among the instincts that Parmelee would reject or would anlayze into a group of instincts or reflexes. This portion of the book is always suggestive and interesting although not always consistent.

Probably the least satisfactory chapters of the book are the three devoted to the psychological problems entitled respectively, "The Nature of Intelligence," "Consciousness" and "Personality, Intelligence, Consciousness and the Nature of Kind." Part of the difficulty is due to too great condensation but more to the fact that the author does not seem fully to have mastered and kept separate the different attitudes and ways of approach that now rule in psychological circles. He frequently brings together in a single discussion statements that are true only if one recognizes that they have been developed from different presuppositions which are in themselves incompatible. The two opposing ways of approach, the objective and the subjective, are those that most often give rise to unclearness. He does not consistently stick to one or the other nor make clear that the two methods are each tenable but cannot be harmonized at present; nor make clear that certain of his conclusions are true if the one set of premises holds, others if the other set is posited. The consequence is an almost all pervasive confusion. This mixing of standpoints comes out clearly in his discussion of the criteria of intelligence. Jennings's functional, but objective, criterion of modifiability of behavior is rejected because it would carry intelligence too low in the animal series. Loeb's associative memory,—strictly taken, a subjective criterion,—obtains more favor, but is made to rest upon the purely structural test of the presence of association centers, and again the ants are said to have association centers, probably from purely functional considerations.