We have seen that Professor Wundt distinguishes two classes of
instinctive acts: first, those which are _acquired_ or have become
wholly or partly mechanized in the course of individual life; secondly,
those which are _connate_ or have been mechanized in the course of
generic evolution. “The laws of practice,” he says,[42] “suffice for
the explanation of the acquired instincts. The occurrence of connate
instincts renders a subsidiary hypothesis necessary. We must suppose
that the physical changes which the nervous elements undergo can be
transmitted from father to son.... The assumption of the inheritance of
acquired dispositions or tendencies is inevitable if there is to be any
continuity of evolution at all. We may be in doubt as to the extent of
this inheritance; we cannot question the fact itself.”
Now, the application of the term “instinct,” both to acquired and to
connate behaviour, seems to prejudge the question of their genetic
connection. And since we have the well-recognized term _habits_ for
actions the performance of which becomes automatic through frequency
of repetition, we may substitute this term, or the phrase _habitual
acts_, for the “acquired instincts” of Professor Wundt. Modifying,
therefore, his statement in accordance with this usage, the fact which,
he says, we cannot question is that acquired habits are inherited as
congenital instincts. This opinion has long been held: G. H. Lewes
regarded instinctive actions as transmitted habits from which the
intelligence, through which they were originally acquired, had lapsed.
Darwin believed that such inheritance was a factor in the evolution
of instinctive behaviour. Romanes distinguished instincts due to
this mode of origin as “secondary;” reserving the term “primary” for
those attributable to natural selection, and describing those in which
both factors co-operate as “instincts of blended origin.” The late
Professor Eimer, of Tübingen, going further than either Darwin or
Romanes, reverted almost entirely to what we may term the Lamarckian
interpretation. “I describe as automatic actions,” he says,[43]
“those which, originally performed consciously and voluntarily, in
consequence of frequent practice come to be performed unconsciously and
involuntarily.... Such acquired automatic actions can be inherited.
Instinct is inherited faculty, especially is inherited habit.” In his
discussion of the subject Eimer makes no express allusion to primary
instincts; but he attributes to lapsed intelligence some of those
which were classed by Romanes as primary, and his tendency is to
refer all instincts to the same source. “Every bird,” he says, “must,
from the first time it hatches its eggs, draw the conclusion that
young will also be produced from the eggs which it lays afterwards,
and this experience must have been inherited as instinct.” Why, in
the first instance, it must draw the conclusion from observation if
it inherit instinctive knowledge, is not made clear. But our present
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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