Psychology Part 17

Probably there is one more fact that belongs under the herd instinct.

A child is lonely even in company, unless he is allowed to _partic.i.p.ate_ in what the others are doing. Sometimes you see an adult who is gregarious but not sociable, who insists on living in the city and wishes to see the people, but has little desire to talk to any one or to take part in any social activities; but he is the exception. As a rule, people wish not only to be together but to do something together. So much as this may be ascribed to the instinct, but no more. "Let's get together and _do something_"--that is as far as the gregarious instinct goes. _What_ we shall do depends on other motives, and on learning as well as instinct.

The mating instinct.

Attraction towards the opposite s.e.x is felt by a small number of children, by most young people beginning from 15 to 20 years of age, by a minority not till a few years later, and, by a small number, never at all. On account of the late maturing of this instinct, in man, instinctive behavior is here inextricably interwoven with what has been learned. A definite organic and emotional state, l.u.s.t, goes with this instinct. Preparatory reactions, called "courtship", are very definitely organized in many animals, and often quite elaborate.

In man, courtship is elaborate enough, but not definitely organized as an instinct; and yet it follows much the same line as we observe in animal courtship. It begins with admiring attention to one of the opposite s.e.x, followed by efforts to attract that one's attention by "display" (strutting, decoration of the person, demonstrating one's prowess, especially in opposition to rivals). Then the male takes an aggressive att.i.tude, the {148} female a coy att.i.tude; the male woos, the female hangs back, and something a.n.a.logous to pursuit and capture takes place, except that the capture may be heartily accepted by both parties.

The "survival value" of this instinct is absolute; without it the race would not long survive. But it has "play value" also, it contributes to the joy of living as well as to the struggle for survival. There is much in social intercourse, and in literature and art, that is motivated by the s.e.x impulse. Some would-be psychologists have been so much impressed by the wide ramifications of the s.e.x motive in human conduct that they have attributed to it all play, all enjoyment, all the softer and lighter side of life, even all the spiritual side of life. One need only run over the long list of instincts, especially those that still remain to be mentioned, in order to be convinced of the one-sidedness of such a view. On the other hand, some moralists have been so deeply impressed by the difficulties that arise out of the s.e.x motive, as to consider it essentially gross and bad; but this is as false as the other view. The s.e.x impulse is like a strong but skittish horse that is capable of doing excellent work but requires a strong hand at the reins and a clear head behind. It is a horse that does not always pull well in a team; yet it is capable of fine teamwork. It can be harnessed up with other tendencies, and when so combined contribute some of its motive force to quite a variety of human activities.

The parental or mothering instinct.

In many species of animals, though not by any means in all, one or both of the parents stays by the young till some degree of maturity is reached. In some kinds of fish, it is the male that cares for the young; in birds it is often both parents. In mammals it is always the mother. Instinctively, the mammalian mother feeds, warms and defends her young. Just as {149} instinctively, the human mother does the same. This instinctive reaction to the little baby is attended by a strong emotion, called, for want of a better name, the "tender emotion".

The strongest stimulus to arouse this instinct is the little, helpless baby. The older child has to take second place with the mother, so soon as there is a little baby there. After a child is weaned, and after he is able to get about and do for himself to quite an extent, he has less hold on the maternal instinct. The love and care that he may still get is less a simple matter of instinct.

Though the little baby is the strongest stimulus to this instinct, older children and even adults, provided they are like the baby in being winsome and helpless in some way, may arouse the same sort of feeling and behavior, tender feeling and protective behavior. A pet animal may arouse the same tendency, and a "darling little calf" or a "cute little baby elephant" may awaken something of the same thrill.

Even a young plant may be tended with a devotion akin to the maternal.

The fact seems to be here, as with other instincts, that objects similar to the natural stimulus may arouse the same impulse and emotion. Love between the s.e.xes is often a compound of s.e.x attraction and the mothering instinct; and it is interesting to watch a happily mated couple each mothering the other.

But is it allowable to speak of this instinct as present in the male human being, or in any one not a mother? Undoubtedly the woman who has recently become a mother is most susceptible to the appeal of a little baby, but the response of other women and of girls to a baby is so spontaneous that we cannot but call it instinctive. Men and boys have no special desire to feed or cuddle a little baby, and are quite contented to leave the care of the baby mostly to the "women folks".

But they do object strongly to seeing the {150} baby hurt or ill-treated, and will respond by protecting it. Also, they like to watch the baby act, and like to help it along in its efforts to do things. This may be instinctive in the man; at least it reminds us of the behavior of a mother cat or dog or horse, when she plays with her young and stimulates them to action. When the mother cat brings a live mouse for her half-grown kittens to practise on, she is acting instinctively, and probably a man is obeying the same instinct when he brings the baby a toy and derives pleasure from watching the baby's attempts to use it.

The parental instinct would thus seem to lie at the root of education, considered as an enterprise of adults directed towards getting the young to acquire the behavior of the race; and it also lies at the root of charity, the desire to protect the helpless.

Is there any instinct in the child answering to the parental, any "filial" instinct, as it were? Psychologists have usually answered no, but possibly they have been misled by the word "filial" and looked in the wrong direction. The parental instinct is an instinct to give, and the answering instinct would be one to take--not to give in return. It is probably not instinctive for the child to do for the parent, but is it not instinctive for the child to take from the parent, and to look to the parent for what he wants? It is not exactly "unnatural conduct"

in a child to impose on his mother, as it would be in the mother to impose on the child; but would it not be unnatural in a child to take an unreceptive and distrustful att.i.tude towards his mother?

Filial love is different. It is not purely instinctive, but depends on intelligence. It is only possible if the child has the intelligence to see the parent as something besides a parent--as some one needing care and protection--and if the child himself takes a parental att.i.tude towards the parent. But that is a grown-up att.i.tude, seldom taken by {151} young children. It is not the infantile instinct, which, if there is such an instinct, is the spring of trustful, docile, dependent, childlike and childish behavior.

The Play Instincts

Any instinct has "play value", but some have also "survival value" and so are serious affairs. Survival value characterizes the instincts we have already listed, both the responses to organic needs and the responses to other people. But there are other instincts with less of survival value, but no less of play value, and these we call the play instincts, without attaching any great importance to the name or even to the cla.s.sification.

Playful activity.

The kicking and throwing the arms about that we see in a well-rested baby is evidently satisfying on its own account. It leads to no result of consequence, except indeed that the exercise is good for the child's muscles and nerves. The movements, taken singly, are not uncoordinated by any means, but they accomplish no definite result, produce no definite change in external objects, and so seem random and aimless to adult eyes. It is impossible to specify the stimulus for any given movement, though probably stimuli from the interior of the body first arouse these responses. They are most apt to occur during the organic state of "euphoria", and tend to disappear during fatigue.

There is a counter-tendency to this tendency towards general activity, and that is _inertia_, the tendency towards inactivity or _economy of effort_. Most p.r.o.nounced in fatigue, this also appears in la.s.situde and inert states that cannot be called fatigue because not brought on by excessive activity. After sleep, many people are inert, and require a certain amount of activity to "warm up" to the active condition. As the child grows older, the {152} "economy of effort" motive becomes stronger, and the random activity motive weaker, so that the adult is less playful and less responsive to slight stimuli. He has to have some definite goal to get up his energy, whereas the child is active by preference and just for the sake of activity.

During the first year or so of the child's life, his playful activity takes shape in several ways. First, out of the great variety of the random movements certain ones are picked out and fixed. This is the way with putting the hand into the mouth or drumming on the floor with the heels, and these instances ill.u.s.trate the important fact that many learned acts develop out of the child's random activity. Without play activity there would be little work or accomplishment of the distinctively human type. Second, certain specific movements, those of locomotion and vocalization, appear with the ripening of the child's native equipment, and take an important place in his play. Third, his play comes to consist more and more of responses to external objects, instead of to internal stimuli as at first. The playful responses to external objects fall into two cla.s.ses, according as they manipulate objects or simply examine them.

We have, then, a small group of instincts that is very closely related to the fundamental instinct of random activity.

Locomotion.

Evidence has already been presented [Footnote: See p. 95.] indicating that walking is instinctive and not learned, so that the human species is no exception to the rule that every species has its instinctive mode of locomotion. Simpler performances which enter into the very complex movement of walking make their appearance separately in the infant before being combined into walking proper. Holding up the head, sitting up, kicking with an alternate motion of the {153} two legs, and creeping, ordinarily precede walking and lead up to it.

What is the natural stimulus to locomotion? It is as difficult to say as it is to specify the stimulus in other forms of playful activity.

From the fact that blind children are usually delayed in beginning to walk, we judge that the sense of sight furnishes some of the most effective stimuli to this response. Often the impulse attending locomotion is the impulse to approach some seen object, but probably some satisfaction is derived simply from the free movement itself.

There certainly is no special emotion going with locomotion.

Locomotion has, of course, plenty of "survival value", and might have been included among the organic instincts.

Some of the other varieties of human locomotion, such as running and jumping, are probably native. Others, like hopping and skipping, are probably learned. As to climbing, there is some evolutionary reason for suspecting that an instinctive tendency in this direction might persist in the human species, and certainly children show a great propensity for it; while the acrobatic ability displayed by those adults whose business leads them to continue climbing is so great as to raise the question whether the ordinary citizen is right when he thinks of man as essentially a land-living or surface-living animal.

As to swimming, the theory is sometimes advanced that this too is a natural form of locomotion for man, and that, consequently, any one thrown into deep water will swim by instinct. Experiments of this sort result badly, the victim clutching frantically at any support, and sometimes dragging down with him the theorist who is administering this drastic sort of education. In short, the instinctive response of a man to being in deep water is the same as in other cases of sudden withdrawal of solid support; it consists in clinging and is attended by the emotion of fear.

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Vocalization.

Crying at birth proves voice-production to be a native response, but we are more interested just here in the playful cooing and babbling that appear when the child is a few weeks or months old. This cheerful vocalization is also instinctive, in all probability, since the baby makes it before he shows any signs of responding imitatively to the voices of other people. It seems to be one form of the random activity that goes with euphoria. The child derives satisfaction not so much from the muscular activity of vocalization as from the sounds that he produces, so that deaf children, who begin to babble much like other children, lag behind them as the months go by, from not deriving this auditory satisfaction from the vocal activity. Though whistling, blowing a horn, shaking a rattle and beating a drum are not native responses, it is clear that the child naturally enjoys producing sounds of various sorts.

The baby's cheerful babbling is the instinctive basis on which his speech later develops through a process of learning.

Manipulation.

While the first random activity of the baby has nothing to do with external objects, but simply consists of free movements of the arms and legs, after a time these give place to manipulation of objects.

The baby turns things about, pulls and pushes them, drops them, throws them, pounds with them. Thus he acquires skill in handling things and also learns how things behave. This form of playful activity contains the germ of constructiveness and of inventiveness, and will come into view again under the head of "imagination."

Exploration or curiosity.

Along with manipulation goes the examination of objects by the hand, the mouth, the eyes and ears, and all the senses. Listening to a sudden noise is one of the first exploratory reactions. Following a moving light with the eyes, fixing the eyes upon a {155} bright object, and exploring an object visually by looking successively at different parts of it, appear in the first few months of the baby's life. Exploration by the hands and by the mouth appear early. Sniffing an odor is a similar exploratory response. When the child is able to walk, his walking is dominated largely by the exploring tendency; he approaches what arouses his curiosity, and embarks on little expeditions of exploration. Similar behavior is seen in animals and is without doubt instinctive. With the acquisition of language, the child's exploration largely takes the form of asking questions.

The stimulus that arouses this sort of behavior is something new and unfamiliar, or at least relatively so. When an object has been thoroughly examined, it is dropped for something else. It is when the cat has just been brought into a strange house that she rummages all over it from garret to cellar. A familiar object is "taken for granted", and arouses little exploratory response.

Quite a group of conscious impulses and emotions goes with exploratory behavior. The feeling or impulse of curiosity is something that everybody knows; like other impulses, it is most strongly felt when the end in view cannot be immediately reached. When you are prevented by considerations of propriety or politeness from satisfying your curiosity, then it is that curiosity is most "gnawing". A very definite emotion that occurs on encountering something extremely novel and strange is what we know as "surprise", and somewhat akin to this is "wonder".

Exploration, though fundamentally a form of playful activity, has great practical value in making the child acquainted with the world.

It contains the germ of seeking for knowledge. We shall have to recur to this instinct more than once, under the head of "attention" and again under "reasoning".

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Manipulation and exploration go hand in hand and might be considered as one tendency rather than two. The child wishes to get hold of an object, that arouses his curiosity, and he examines it while handling it. You cannot properly get acquainted with an object by simply looking at it, you need to manipulate it and make it perform; and you get little satisfaction from manipulating an object unless you can watch how it behaves.

Tendencies running counter to exploration and manipulation.

Just as playful activity in general is limited by the counter tendencies of fatigue and inertia, so the tendency to explore and handle the unfamiliar is held in check by counter tendencies which we may call "caution" and "contentment".

Watch an animal in the presence of a strange object. He looks at it, sniffs, and approaches it in a hesitating manner; suddenly he runs away for a short distance, then faces about and approaches again. You can see that he is almost evenly balanced between two contrary tendencies, one of which is curiosity, while the other is much like fear. It is not full-fledged fear, not so much a tendency to escape as an alertness to be ready to escape.

Watch a child just introduced to a strange person or an odd-looking toy. The child seems fascinated, and can scarcely take his eyes from the novel object, but at the same time he "feels strange", and cannot commit himself heartily to getting acquainted. There is quite a dose of caution in the child's make-up--more in some children than in others, to be sure--with the result that the child's curiosity gets him into much less trouble than might be expected. Whether caution is simply to be identified with fear or is a somewhat different native tendency, it is certainly a check upon curiosity.