Reflex Action and Instinct

I HAVE approached the consideration of behaviour from the biological side, though I seek also to correlate it with its accompanying experience. Taking, for example, the graceful and effective flight of the swallow on the wing which would popularly be regarded as an instinctive performance, I regard much of its delicate accuracy, and the nicety of its accommodation to varying circumstances, as due to intelligent guidance, the outcome of much experience gained on previous occasions and now utilized on this occasion. Some slight improvement may be due to the repeated functioning of the lower nerve-centres as such: some further improvement is no doubt due to the continued development and maturing of these centres. But more improvement is, I conceive, due to cortical influence. I do not suggest, and have never dreamt of suggesting, that the flight of an adult swallow would be what it is, and as it is, in the absence of such interaction between the higher and the lower nerve-centres. But tracing backwards the story of flight-development in the individual bird —piecing together such a story from what appear to be trustworthy observations—I reach the stage when the swallow first dives from the nest. ¹ I am satisfied that on this first occasion we have true flight, in the absence of any previous experience of flight as such. If it be said that the young bird has had ample opportunities of seeing its parents fly, and has already learnt to fly by watching them, I venture to assert that in no such manner can a skilled act be learnt. If even a man cannot learn to fence or to play billiards by watching others who are skilled exponents, and this notwithstanding the fact of the large amount of control over his bodily activities already acquired by long experience and practice in other fields of skill, how can we expect a fledgling swallow to learn to fly by watching his parents, seeing that he has never yet put his wings to their true functional use? I do not deny that he has already some experience of fluttering his wings within and on the edge of the nest. I am ready to grant him so much experience before he dives from the nest; but I contend that the actual flight, when he commits himself to the wing, is a substantially new experience. Again I do not deny that during his very first flight he is, all the time of its continuance, gaining experience; nor do I deny that the experience thus being gained from moment to moment is from moment to moment influential on his effective flight. Provisionally I am prepared to admit the possible presence of exceedingly dim, vague, and ill-defined pre-perception of the behaviour that is coming, just before it actually comes; but I assume that all experience is the conscious accompaniment of the functional activity of the cortical centres, and that this should analytically be distinguished from the subtly compounded reflex actions of the lower centres by which instinctive behaviour as such is determined.