Note 130 — LECTURE VIII THE UNCONSCIOUS

From the point of view here adopted, the recent discussions and controversies over the problems of “instinct and intelligence” have been much muddled by the arbitrary denial of conscious elements to an instinctive process, and by the acceptation of consciousness or conscious experience as the criterion of intelligence. In this view instinct and intelligence become contrasted concepts which to my way of thinking they are not necessarily at all. If it is admitted that instinct is an innate disposition, its contrasted quality is that which is acquired and not the quality of consciousness. It is true that acquired behavior is commonly if not always determined by conscious processes (conscious experience), but likewise innate behavior may be determined by processes which contain conscious elements. Surely fear is instinctive and is a conscious element in an innate process; and so must be visual and other sensory images, as in the first peck of a chicken. To look upon the first visual image simply as conscious “experience,” as an “onlooker,” and reject it as a factor in the process which determines that first peck, seems to me to be arbitrary psychology if not physiology. If consciousness may be a quality of an innate process—and why not?—it cannot be a criterion of intelligence. The true converse of the conscious is the unconscious.

This adopted antithesis between consciousness and instinct, from this point of view as well as the arbitrary limitation of the localization of the whole of an instinctive process to the subcortical centers, vitiates the force of the very able presentation of the subject by Dr. Morgan, if I correctly understand him. I know of no data which forbid the cortex to be included in the innate mechanism of an instinctive process. On the contrary, it is difficult to understand instinctive behavior and its modifications through conscious experience unless cortical centers are included in the psycho-physiological arcs. At any rate we may define instinct and intelligence in terms of the conscious and the unconscious, or in brain terms, but we should not mix up these aspects with that of localization in the definition. Mr. McDougall’s conception of instinct appeals to me more strongly from both a biological and a psychological point of view, and further seems to me to be more in consonance with the data of experience.