Habit and instinct / by C. Lloyd Morgan.

  • C. Lloyd Morgan
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Habit and instinct / by C. Lloyd Morgan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    343/402 page 329
    are the instinctive activities of man ? They appear to be for the most part certain performances, some of them rising little if at all above the level of reflex actions, which are the heritage of our animal nature. Sucking and taking the breast, hanging to one’s fingers or to a stick, as Dr. Louis Robinson * has well shown, certain methods of progression on all fours, according to Mr. S. S. Buck- man,! co-ordinated leg movements for walking, an early and probably instinctive differential response in arm and hand movements according as an object is within or beyond their reach, and a tendency to use the right hand where strong effort is required, as Prof. Mark Baldwin t has shown (the latter, so far as we know, a distinctively human trait); these and the sexual instincts, together with the coarser emotions and their more or less definite expression, well nigh exhaust the list. And there is little in them to throw any light upon these problems of instinct which it is our business to discuss; little to help us in deciding between the rival claims of a purely Darwinian and an exclusively Lamarckian theory of origin. The faculty of speech has been suggested as likely to afford evidence of a decisive sort; but as matters stand there is not much to be gained from it when it is cross- examined as a witness. Prof. Weismann indeed brought forward the absence of any instinctive result of the habit of speech as an argument against the transmission of acquired characters. “Not even are our children,” he said, “able to talk of their own accord; yet not only have their parents, but more than that, an infinitely long * Nineteenth Century, November, 1891. t Nature, November 8, 1891, vol. li. p. 31. Cf. Nineteenth Century, for November, 1894. % “ Mental Development in the Child and the Race,” pp. 54 and 64.
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