ABSTRACT
Where an animal, under particular circumstances encountered by it for the first time in its life, proceeds smoothly and without hesitation to some natural goal, we speak of purely instinctive action. Such actions are not displayed by human beings in unmistakable fashion; hence all the fuss and difficulty about the question of instincts in the human species. We have seen that such purely instinctive action implies a native propensity to such action linked with appropriate native abilities, perceptive and executive; and we saw that such a system of linked dispositions, provided by heredity and reaching a state of readiness for action by spontaneous maturation, constitutes, in the strictest sense of the word, an instinct.
