Conwy Lloyd Morgan

“ We seem forced to accept a practical criterion for purposes of interpretation rather than one which can be theoretically defended against all adverse criticism. We have reason to believe that some organisms profit by experience and show that they do so by the modification of their behaviour in accordance with circumstances. ”

“ The evolutionist school, but not without exception, incline to the view that we find in animals the beginnings of conceptual experience; some are, however, of opinion that, in the absence of language, conceptual analysis is well-nigh impossible, and in any case cannot be carried far. To an evolutionist the assertion that conceptual intelligence could not conceivably have had a natural genesis from perceptual experience, appears to be made on grounds other than scientific. ”

“ The group of instincts which we class as imitative (and they afford only the foundations on which intelligent imitation is based) are of biological value chiefly, if not solely, in those species which form larger or smaller communities.
The study of instinct is in the genetic treatment of evolutionary science a study in heredity. The favouring bionomic conditions are those of a relatively constant environment under which relatively stereotyped responses are advantageous. If the environment be complex, there is a corresponding Relation to heredity complexity in instinctive behaviour. ”

“ If a great number of the actions of animals are only perceptually intelligent, so too are a great number of the actions of men and women. This is unquestionably the case; and it serves to bring out the distinction in value which may be assigned to the percept and the concept respectively. The value of the percept is for simple direct practical behaviour; the value of the concept is for the elaboration of systematic knowledge. Any given impression may have meaning for behaviour in a given situation which is like that which has previously developed in a certain manner ”

“ Natural selection which, under a uniform and constant environment, leads to the survival of relatively fixed and definite modes of response, under an environment presenting a wider range of varying possibilities leads to the survival of plastic accommodation through intelligence. This plasticity is, however, itself hereditary. All intelligent procedure implies the inherited capacity of profiting by experience. Instinctive in the popular sense, it does not fall within the narrower definition of the term ”

“ We are now in a position to give an expanded definition of instinctive behaviour as comprising those complex groups of co-ordinated acts which, though they contribute to experience, are, on their first occurrence, not determined by individual experience; which are adaptive and tend to the well-being of the individual and the preservation of the race ”

“ It is the business of scientific interpretation to disentangle the factors which contribute to the joint-products. It is indeed by no means easy to distinguish between what is dependent on individual experience, and what is not. Only the careful observation of organisms throughout the earlier phases of their life-history can the closely related factors be distinguished with any approach to scientific accuracy. By the patient study of the behaviour of precocious young birds, such as chicks, pheasants, ducklings and moorhens, it can be Examples from bird life. ”

“ Fully realizing, therefore, the difficulty of finding and applying a criterion of the presence or absence of consciousness, it is none the less desirable, in the interests of psychology, to state that truly instinctive acts (as defined) are accompanied by consciousness. This marks them off from such reflex acts as are unconsciously performed, and from the tropisms of plants and other lowly organisms. There remains, however, the difficulty of finding any satisfactory criterion of the presence of consciousness. ”

“ The whole range of perceptual intelligence in animals illustrates the manner in which accommodation to varied circumstances is reached. On these foundations in varied experience conceptual intelligence is developed. The early stages of its development, whether in the child, in whom it unquestionably occurs, or in the higher animals, in which it is not improbably incipient, are difficult to determine on the basis of observation of its expression in behaviour or conduct. ”

“ But it is probable that what we speak of as the imitative tendency is, in any given species, the expression of a considerable number of particular responses each of which is congenitally linked with a particular presentation or stimulus. ”

“ Instinctive behaviour thus depends solely on how the nervous system has been built through heredity; while intelligent behaviour depends also on those characters of the nervous system which have been acquired under the modifying influence of individual relation to the environment. ”

“ In this matter they are not shielded from the incidence of natural selection. Thus it would seem that, where natural selection is excluded, the habit has not become congenitally linked with a visual stimulus; but where natural selection is in operation, the response has been thus linked with the stimulus of water in the bill. ”

“ The trend of modern opinion appears to be in the direction of the Weismannian interpretation. And it must be regarded as questionable, if not improbable, that instinctive modes of behaviour are in any degree directly due to the inheritance of habits intelligently acquired. That intelligent habits may secure the survival of those organisms whose germ-plasm bears the seeds of favourable congenital variations is not improbable. But in that case intelligent procedure only contributes to the survival and not to the origin of hereditary variations. ”

“ Few if any psychologists contend, on strictly psychological grounds, for a distinction of kind such as Mivart and Wasmann postulate. Conscious experience is indeed sui generis and is distinct in kind from the energy with which the physicist or the physiologist has to deal ”

“ If the psychological status of the animal is to be seriously discussed, the question to be answered is this: Are the observed activities explainable in terms of perceptual process only, or do they demand also a supplementary exercise of conceptual process? Granting that they are intelligent in the broad acceptation of the word, are they only perceptually intelligent or also conceptually intelligent? ”

“ There is a tendency to apply the term intellect more especially to the capacity for conceptual thinking. This does not hold in the same degree of the connected word intelligence. We speak freely of ‘animal intelligence,’ but the phrase ‘animal intellect’ is unusual. ”

“ The instincts of nest-building, incubation and the rearing of young, though they occur later in life than those concerned in locomotion and the obtaining of food, are none the less founded on a hereditary basis, and in some respects are less rather than more liable to modification by the experience gained by the carrying out of hereditarily definite modes of procedure. ”

“ A good deal of human behaviour may be interpreted in terms of perceptual intelligence, and a far larger proportion of animal behaviour may be so interpreted. But some human conduct cannot be explained save as the outcome of conceptual intelligence. ”

“ It seems, however, that in young chicks drinking from still water is a habit acquired through imitation of the acts of the hen-mother. The presentation of such water to sight does not evoke the appropriate instinctive response, while the presentation of water taken into the bill does at once evoke a characteristic response. ”

“ Wasmann, who argues on similar grounds, regards such behaviour as that of the chicken as instinctive in the wider sense (see Instinct) and not intelligent; man alone, he contends, is intelligent, that is to say has the power of perceiving the relations of concepts to each other, and of drawing conclusions therefrom. ”

“ If this interpretation be correct we have here an example of the manner in which imitation plays an important part in the formation of habits which though oft-repeated are not transmitted as hereditary instincts. But the imitative act is itself instinctive. The characteristic Imitation. feature of the imitative act, at the instinctive level, is that the presentation to sight or hearing calls forth a mode of behaviour of like nature to, or producing like results to, that which affords the stimulus. The nature of instinctive imitation needs working out in further detail. ”

“ It is indeed sometimes urged that instinctive modes of behaviour should be so defined as to entirely exclude any reference to their psychological concomitants in consciousness, which are, it is said, entirely inferential. ”

“ But the Peckhams’ careful observations and experiments show that, with the American wasps, the victims stored in the nests are quite as often dead as alive; that those which are only paralysed live for a varying number of days, some more, some less; that wasp larvae thrive just as well on dead victims, sometimes dried up, sometimes undergoing decomposition, as on living and paralysed prey; that the nerve-centres are not stung with the supposed uniformity; and that in some cases paralysis, in others death, follows when the victims are stung in parts far removed from any nerve-centre. ”

“ A solution can only be obtained by well-planned observations conducted by those who have an adequate psychological training. Even under these conditions a criterion of the presence or absence of conceptual factors is needed; and such a criterion is not easy to formulate or to apply.
If we institute inquiries with a view to ascertaining how the conceptual factor originates, it appears to be the result of analysis and abstraction, and to be reached by a process of comparison which becomes intentional and deliberate. If, for example, in educational Development of concept. ”

“ It should be remembered that such comparatively simple activities, though there is little about them to arrest popular attention, are just the raw material out of which the normal active life of such organisms is elaborated, and that for scientific treatment they are therefore not less important than those more conspicuous performances which seem at first sight to call for special treatment, or even to demand a supplementary explanation. ”

“ The habit results mainly from the modification of the higher nerve-centres through individual and intelligent use. In the migration of birds we are still uncertain as to the exact nature and proportional value of the instinctive and intelligent factors. The impulse to migrate, that is to say, the calling forth of specific activities by climatal or other presentations, appears to be instinctive; whether the direction of migration is in like manner instinctive is a matter of uncertainty ”

“ A duckling only a few hours old if placed in water swims with orderly strokes. The stimulus of water on the breast may be regarded as a sensory presentation which is followed by a definite and adaptive application of behaviour. ”

“ The sight of the sage-blossom may have meaning for the bee which has sucked the sweets contained in such flowers; the sight of the bee in this situation may have significance for scientific interpretation as an example of the fertilization of flowers by insects. The bee may be only perceptually intelligent; the man who observes its action may or may not be conceptually intelligent. ”

“ Few would dream of contending that the chick a few days old is capable of conceptual thought. Naïve perceptual process pretty obviously suffices for an explanation of the behaviour of the little bird. But so too, it may be said, does it suffice for the explanation of much of the Their value. practical behaviour of men. ”

“ A chick Perceptual process. in the performance of its truly instinctive activities pecks at all sorts of small objects. In doing so it gains a certain amount of initial experience. Very soon it may be observed that some grubs and caterpillars are seized with avidity whenever occasion offers; while others are after a few trials let alone. Broadly speaking, we have here intelligent selection and rejection. ”

“ Any given object is both red and square and made of flannel, blue and round and made of wood, and so on. We teach the child to group the objects, to put all the blues, yellows and reds together irrespective of shape or material ”