ABSTRACT
‘Innate action potentials’ might seem to be only another, and perhaps clumsier, name for those impulses to behaviour which are taken to be innate in the human organism and are variously referred to as instincts, drives, urges, tendencies, needs, and the like. Of all these the instinct concept emphasizes most strongly the innate nature of the impulses and their relation to specific behaviour patterns. Unhappily, the term has a confused history and, to-day, a dubious value. If the innateness of instincts and their relation to specific modes of behaviour are understood in a rigid sense, as they sometimes are, then the instinct is either a ‘blind unconscious mechanism’ or nothing. 368 Its essential feature is that it is unlearned and not modifiable by learning. It belongs to the universals of human behaviour in the strictest sense of the word. It would thus make no sense to say that instincts vary in different groups, that they are altered or controlled by habit, and ‘weakly’ or ‘strongly’ developed in varying cultural conditions. Yet precisely this sort of plasticity is also imputed to instincts, at least in man and the higher animals, to wit: ‘The lower animals inherit fixed instincts, they must take their “ready-mades” and wear them. The higher animals inherit less well-fixed instincts, better able to be fashioned to fit the life of the times.’ 369 ;
