Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/196

180 social or philosophical student manifold for the slight effort involved in mastering them.

An argument for the derivation of values from instincts is liable summarily to be dismissed by many readers without serious consideration because they fancy that it presupposes some biological or metaphysical position objectionable to them: it takes vitalism or mechanism for granted, or it begs the question in favor of idealism, or what not. The best way perhaps to show that the conviction that values are derived from instincts is not necessarily founded upon any particular biological or metaphysical conceptions is to suggest some of the extremely different positions that could be held along with it.

On the biological side I do not see that the theory presupposes any particular doctrine as to the origin of instincts. The holder of the theory may be mechanistic in his sympathies. In that case he may believe that instincts owe their origin to fortuitous combinations of reflexes preserved by natural selection. A biologist with Lamarckian leanings might regard instincts as inherited habits due originally to the besoin of the organism. They could be regarded, no doubt, as a variety of Driesch's entelechies. McDougall has suggested that they may be regarded as differentiations of the 'will to live' or of Bergson's élan vital. He himself, I suppose, regards them as in some sense functions of the soul, but he does not discuss this question in his defence of animism in Body and Mind. The instincts could easily be regarded as individuations of any over-individual will or Absolute that a voluntaristic philosophy might choose to postulate. The only qualification would be, that if the instincts are assumed to be determinations of any such vital impulse or over-individual will, intelligence is a further development from instincts, and not something external to them and superimposed upon them. The Bergsonian antithesis between instinct and intuition would thus be impossible. But the doctrine is not necessarily committed to a voluntaristic metaphysics, or to the