Among psychologists who have busied themselves with these questions there has hitherto been no large measure of agreement as to the number of specific instinctive proclivities that so are native to man; nor is there any agreement as to the precise functional range and content ascribed to each. In a loose way it is apparently taken for granted that these instincts are to be conceived as discrete and specific elements in human nature, each working out its own determinate functional content without greatly blending with or being diverted by the working of its neighbours in that spiritual complex into which they all enter as constituent elements.[5] For the purposes of an exhaustive psychological analysis it is doubtless expedient to make the most of such discreteness as is observable among the instinctive proclivities. But for an inquiry into the scope and method of their working-out in the growth of institutions it is perhaps even more to the purpose to take note of how and with what effect the several instinctive proclivities cross, blend, overlap, neutralise or reënforce one another. The most convincing genetic view of these phenomena throws the instinctive proclivities into close relation with the tropismatic sensibilities and brings them, in the physiological respect, into the same general class with the latter.[6] If taken uncritically and in general terms this view would seem to carry the implication that the instincts should be discrete and discontinuous among themselves somewhat after the same fashion as the tropismatic sensibilities with which they are in great measure bound up; but on closer scrutiny such a genetic theory of the instincts does not appear to enforce the view that they are to be conceived as effectually discontinuous or mutually exclusive, though it may also not involve the contrary,--that they make a continuous or ambiguously segmented body of spiritual elements. The recognised tropisms stand out, to all appearance, as sharply defined physiological traits, transmissible by inheritance intact and unmodified, separable and unblended, in a manner suggestively like the “unit characters” spoken of in latter day theories of heredity.[7]