Mind and heredity / by Vernon L. Kellogg.

  • Vernon Lyman Kellogg
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Mind and heredity / by Vernon L. Kellogg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    49/136 (page 27)
    REFLEXES AND TROPISMS 27 no other reason than a basis of our common knowledge of the power of the human being to dislocate, both in time and place, many of his reactions from his stimuli. My stimu¬ lus and my reaction may be days apart and miles away from each other. But whether those forms of our behavior that the physiologist and human psycholo¬ gist call reflex are, or are not, of the same type as the reflexes of the lower animals, we certainly recognize part of our behavior as instinctive and quite of the type of the instinctive behavior of Ammophila and of the myriad other instinct-controlled lower animals. Our instinctive behavior, indeed, is of so much importance to us that some of it is actually necessary to the saving and persistence of our lives. Take the babe's act of suckling, for in¬ stance. This is a behavior common to all of us individuals of the human species—just as it is to all individuals of all mammal spe¬ cies—and is neither taught us nor learned from individual experience but is something of which we are just naturally capable from the moment of birth ; an inherited possession of the species. That puts it in the category of instinct, simon-pure instinct. How we came, as species, originally to possess this capacity of instinctive behav-