ABSTRACT
Instincts are thus in the first instance independent of conscious planning or anticipation. These facts led William James to frame his famous definition of an instinct as “a tendency to act in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of those ends and without previous education in the performance of the action”. Some psychologists have come thus to reserve the term instinct for those tendencies to action which normally carry with them a characteristic emotion. The emotion and the instinct are found to show a very intimate relation, so intimate that it is often extremely difficult to say where the one ends and the other begins. It is important to realise that a “sensation”,—say, of blue, or hot, or of a note of a certain pitch,—is a mere abstraction. All sensations have a specific quality,—the redness, or yellowness, or greyness, of visual sensations; the sweetness or bitterness of taste; the pitch and timbre of sounds.
