Chapter 9

Instinct

1066. After considering the soul from the point of view of its passivity and receptivity, and deducing from this the potencies I have called 'passive' and 'receptive', I must now consider it from the point of view of its action, and from this deduce its active potencies.

We must never forget however what has been said about the internal constitution of the soul which is by nature a principle, and cannot be conceived without its terms. Principles and terms are correlative and synthesising. In so far as the principle is affected by its term, it is receptive or passive. But this receptivity and passivity involves a degree of activity proper to the principle. Thus the activity in created subjects arises partly from receptivity and passivity, and is partly their condition.

Granted therefore that the principle (whose being lies in its union with its term, as I said) has already been posited in being, its activity is not limited to receptivity and passivity. Provided the term is capable of receiving the principle's actions and being changed by it, the principle acts on its own term. If the nature of the term were pure act, all passivity or receptivity would be excluded by the essence of the term, as is the case with God and divine things. The activity of the subject therefore is carried out in the subject itself; by approaching or withdrawing from the term, the subject modifies its union with it.

1067. There are two primal terms of the human soul, the felt element and the understood element, relative to which the soul is respectively passive and receptive. Two activities of very different nature correspond to the two terms. One activity is called 'instinct'; and has its origin in sensitivity; the other, 'will', and its origin in intelligence.

The term of instinct is changeable, and is in fact changed when instinctive activity acts on it; the term of the will, in so far as it is the same as that of pure intelligence, is unchangeable because it is something divine (ideas). Consequently the activity originating from the will is limited to a varying degree of receptivity; in other words, the will acts on and changes the soul rather than the object-term of intelligence.

1068. Instinct therefore is the movement of sensitivity. Because sensitivity accompanies all the soul's potencies and actions, even rational actions, instinct extends to and is present in every part of the human being. Hence, a complete description of its subdivisions should include the special activities of this potency by tracing and classifying all the rest, and showing that each has its own special and proper instinct.

1069. Instinct is of its nature a blind potency. But because rational and moral potencies also have their instincts, we must distinguish between instinct that is totally blind in its movement and term, and instinct which, although blind in its primary endeavour or movement, is not blind in its term, or is blind purely in its movement but not in its effort and term. In fact, if we consider the instinctive movement of the will we see that it begins from a light and terminates in a known object. This movement is blind in so far as made by natural, spontaneous inclination and without deliberation or decree, as sometimes happens. For this reason alone the movement can be called instinctive. An example of instinct that is blind in its endeavour and movement but not in its term, are the acts by which we acquire our first cognitions - acts which tend to acquire the light of cognition they did not have at first. The subject, when moved to acquire his first cognitions, still does not have them, and cannot therefore move towards them except blindly, drawn by his feeling and native activity. Consequently the start of this movement is blind, although its term is cognition in which there is light.

1070. We need to distinguish two divisions; first, an entirely blind instinct not associated with any cognition either in its principle or term - this is animal instinct, which is also present in the human being because a human being is an animal—and secondly, an instinct, human instinct, which is blind in its movement but associated with some cognition either at the beginning or at the end of its movement.

1071. The different actions of animal instinct can perhaps be fittingly reduced to six classes. The soul's first act, or principle of instinct, is to posit itself by uniting itself to its term. But I will disregard this first act and list only the following actions which derive from it:

1. Instinct plays a role in the production of accidental animal feelings.

2. It has the power to reproduce feelings when these have lost their actuality and leave only traces, that is, habitual inclinations, in the spirit. This action is accomplished only with the help of the following instinctive faculties.

3. Through the unity of the soul, instinct has the power of associating and unifying feelings. I have called this the synthetical force of the animal; it can cause actions so extraordinary that they resemble those of reason. I have spoken at length about this instinct in the Anthropology.(89)

4. As a result of the association of several feelings in the unity of the soul, certain general modifications are brought about in the soul. These I call 'affections'. They are feelings lying midway, as it were, between individual feelings and passions. These affections are therefore the generative principles of passions, and when they are complete and leave an habitual inclination to reproduce themselves, are called 'passion'.

5. Passions are the fifth manifestation of the instinctive potency.

6. Finally, the sixth manifestation of the instinctive animal potency is the activity with which this potency modifies the sensiferous element by producing in it movements corresponding to the way in which the instinct adjusts itself.

1072. I will make some observations about passions and spontaneous adjustments, the last two manifestations of instinct.

1073. Passions are not purely animal. In fact, animal passions in human beings must be carefully distinguished from rational passions.

1074. Both kinds fit the division we find in Plato, that is, of passions proper to our concupiscent faculty and to our irascible faculty. By desire I mean the inclination which draws us towards good and away from evil. By frustration I mean that sudden energy which is concentrated and, as it were, built up in the soul when the soul encounters an external impediment to its tendency.(90) The soul uses this tendency to struggle and strive to remove and overcome the impediment and thus give free reign to its desiring tendency.

1075. Relative to animal passions, passions of desire tend to the possession of what is pleasant and the avoidance of what is unpleasant — for an animal there is no other good or evil. Passions of frustration are ordered to remove forcibly and overcome the difficulty that the tendencies of desire encounter against their full unfolding. Hence, properly speaking, the irascible faculty is simply an activity of the faculty of desire which is harmed by and defends itself against foreign impediments that oppose its progress without destroying or weakening it.

1076. We must not attribute love, which is a noble, rational passion, to animals. In its place, they have unitive affection, which can be subdivided into a generative tendency and that group of passions included in the tendency to aggregation. This group includes the instinct which preserves and brings together animals of the same species, posits sympathies or antipathies in different species, unites offspring to their mother, and produces the affection which binds some animals to human beings, domesticity, etc.

1077. The same can be said about hatred which properly speaking expresses a rational passion and corresponds to aversion, antipathy, etc. in animality.

1078. Desire and abhorrence are rational, not animal passions. However, in animality, we find various tendencies specified by their respective terms, such as voracity, hunger, etc.

1079. Joy is proper to intelligence. There is a corresponding feeling in animality but without its own well-defined name because not all animal passions are individually expressed in language. Consequently the same word is often used with a different meaning to indicate sometimes a purely animal passion and sometimes the corresponding passion visible in a rational being. Examples are the two words 'sadness' and 'gladness', etc.

1080. This scarcity and poverty of language disposes a negligent mind to confuse the sensitive and rational orders.

1081. Ownership can also be classed among animal passions. It draws the affections of the animal to certain inanimate things, and appears identical in human beings except that they enjoy knowledge of their ownership. This adds a rational element to the feeling of ownership. Moreover, humans, with their moral faculty, raise the feeling of ownership to the level of right, of which this feeling is only the matter.(91)

1082. Although the words 'anger', 'ferocity', 'fear', 'expectation', etc. are often applied to both animals and human beings equally, they seem more appropriate to the former than the latter. On the other hand, the words 'indignation', 'fear', 'boldness', 'desperation' clearly express rational affections and passions. When authors apply these words to animals, they do so by a kind of transference and by the tendency of human beings to equate their intellective life and reason to all the entia they perceive, especially if these entia manifest phenomena normally produced by intelligence, even though they can be produced by quite a different cause.

1083. Human beings, because they are animal, have animal passions. But rationality gives these passions a characteristic of their own which ennobles and specifies them.

1084. Moreover, animal passions, which in beasts are moved only by stimuli and by the laws of corporeal sense, are sometimes aroused in humans by rationality itself through the influence exercised by the rational soul in animality. Thus sadness, considered as an animal passion, can be defined as 'an unpleasant feeling experienced by the animal, accompanied in certain viscera by retardation of the circulation of the blood and by diminished activity of the nervous system.' In an animal, only a physical or sensuous cause, such as retardation of the circulation or loss of nervous vigour, can produce this feeling, which in a human being, is sometimes produced by the same cause and sometimes by information that saddens the spirit; in other words, by the rational potency.

1085. Animal passions therefore are not the same as those in human beings for two reasons:
1. granted the same productive cause as in animals, intelligence is associated with them and modifies them. Thus sadness which causes an illness in an animal differs from sadness in a human being who knows his malaise. The knowledge increases the affliction. Furthermore, by using motives furnished by reason, we can ease and alleviate the sadness, even physically.
2. In human beings animal passions can, as I have said, be put into motion by a rational cause.

1086. There are also new passions in human beings of which no trace can be found in animals. Movements of the rational potency produce new effects and feelings which cannot in any way be aroused by purely animal instinct.

1087. These feelings proper to human beings sometimes seem to be purely rational or contained within the sphere of intelligence. Sometimes however it seems that animality has a place in them.

1088. In this case, animality experiences an affection that cannot be manifested in the mere animal because intelligence, the productive cause, is lacking. Here I do not intend to solve the problem about 'the presence in human beings of affections so pure that their animality has no part in them, or about the constant pressure of both intelligence and animality.' Others can solve this subtle problem; I am content to establish that in human beings some entirely new passions are revealed which cannot be produced by animal instinct, and whose sole cause is intelligence. Relative to their cause, they are intellective passions, but are perhaps never purely intellective in themselves.

1089. From this class of passions I absolutely exclude sympathetic passions, like compassion, etc. If something similar should show itself in animals, it can in my opinion always be reduced to individual passions and feelings. Basically, an animal moves only in virtue of its sense-experiences, which is the opposite of human beings, who share in others' passions purely by knowing them. When we know others' passions, we can imagine them and so enter into them as they are. Compassion is certainly a rational passion in both its cause and in itself; if something similar becomes visible in an animal, it can be reduced to unitive affection; in other words, to what concerns aggregation, etc.

Passions common to animals have their source in what is pleasant and in what is difficult. But in human beings, because of their rationality, there are two other sources, rapid motion of the spirit and that which is great. Our spirit, which passes rapidly from one intellective state to another opposite intellective state, not only increases the vivacity of its sensitive act by means of this rapidity (which also happens in animal sense), but produces new and sudden feelings, like laughter, amazement. Again, only we with our reason can be made susceptible of feeling what is great. This feeling produces various affections like wonder, stupor, ecstasy, etc., all of which are human passions that are totally lacking in animals.

1090. I must now make a brief comment about the sixth manifestation of animal instinct which I placed in the power that feeling has to adjust itself by modifying the sensiferous element.

To understand what I mean by this power of feeling, we must bear in mind that we know feeling in two ways: 1. through the feeling itself of which we are directly conscious (subjectively) and 2. through phenomena which while produced by feeling and felt by us, are not the feeling itself (extrasubjectively). Thus sensation of pain is one thing, but the movements it causes in the body are another; these movements can be seen without our feeling pain. Pain is a subjective feeling; the movements are extrasubjective phenomena produced by the feeling and indicating pain, although of a totally different nature from pain. While extrasubjective phenomena are known by means of other feelings, these feelings have nothing to do with the feeling under discussion although they also have their subjective and extrasubjective part. All this was discussed in the Anthropology, to which I refer the reader who wants to follow my argument.

Granted therefore the careful distinction between subjective and extrasubjective parts of feeling, we immediately understand how subjective feeling is something totally immune from space and consequently extremely simple. In the concept of pleasure, of pain and of every other purely subjective feeling, no one can find the concept of any extension, which is only the term of certain feelings, not feeling itself. Nevertheless, extrasubjective phenomena have a simultaneity and correlation with subjective phenomena. I have said that there is no relationship of direct cause and effect between one and the other, because they are totally dissimilar. However, when subjective phenomena change, extrasubjective phenomena also change.
This gives rise to the belief that the change in subjective phenomena can be at least the indirect if not the direct cause of the changes. If we restrict our consideration solely to the dissimilarity between the two series of phenomena, the argument remains uncertain. It becomes certain however when we consider that subjective feeling terminates, as I have said, in an extended element which itself is already, in a sense, extrasubjective, although individually united to the subject. Furthermore, the extended element pertains to the extrasubjective phenomena of the sensiferous element, with which it is identical in substance. Consequently, although (subjective) feeling is not the direct, proximate cause of the extrasubjective phenomena pertaining to the sensiferous element, it causes the change in its own direct term (the extended element), which is also the subject of the extrasubjective phenomena of the sensiferous element. (Subjective) feeling is therefore the remote, indirect cause of the modification of extrasubjective phenomena; in other words, it causes the cause of this modification. Having firmly established all this, I hold that 'the subject which is the principle of feeling is bound of itself to use and adjust its feeling in such a way that it obtains the best possible good and hence the least possible discomfort.' This power and activity of the sentient principle which adjusts and modifies its feeling is the cause of modifications in extrasubjective phenomena. The faculties relative to these modifications are principally four:

1. The locomotive faculty, by means of which the animal walks and makes different use of all its organs.

2. The plastic or formative faculty, by means of which human beings are made, fed, etc. In the fifth book I will describe more fully how this happens and the laws governing it.

3. The faculty of sensitive habits, which is the power of being able to adjust in one way rather than another. This power develops and modifies through exercise, receiving new dispositions, new conditions for its action and consequently new spontaneities.

4. The faculty that animal instinct has to alter and harm itself. This faculty (to which harmful phenomena pertain) is, like the three previous faculties, the same general faculty or power by which feeling can adjust in different ways to the different states given it by stimuli, habits, etc. Hence, whenever the stimuli place it in certain states, the law of its spontaneity always makes it produce the above-mentioned, harmful phenomena, about which I will speak later.

1091. Human instinct, which is still the subject of our discussion, although blind as instinct, is associated with some knowledge in which it originates or finishes. It also reveals itself in rational affections, which produce both a passive state of the spirit, called 'rational passion', and an active state, which constitutes habits.

1092. Rational passions have been briefly, but sufficiently discussed. About habits, I say that a habit is 'a disposition of a potency to act in a given way'. Habits are primarily divided in the same way as the potencies or faculties which they modify and actuate.
Human, intellective faculties and potencies, classified according to their effects, can be reduced to two groups: those which produce beneficial or harmful effects in a subject, and those (extrasubjective) which, producing effects outside the subject, cause movements of bodies.

1093. There are therefore two groups of habits: those adhering to faculties which produce their effects in the subject, and those pertaining to faculties which produce their effects outside the subject.

1094. The faculties which produce their effects in the subject can be reduced to 1. moral potency, which gives us moral habits, that is, virtues and vices, and 2. to rational potency, in so far as it acts in the subject, which gives us rational habits such as memory, the different branches of knowledge, prudence, etc.

1095. But in so far as rational potency moves bodies and produces extrasubjective effects, it provides the second group of faculties which gives rise to habits of mechanical and liberal arts, of depraved movements of our own body, etc.

1096. So far I have dealt with the principal branches of rational instinct, classifying it according to the modes of its operation.
Another classification is possible by examining its many subdivisions in conjunction with the different objects to which instinct is referred. But for the sake of brevity, it will be sufficient to present the following synoptic schema (pp. 158-159), in which the faculties and instinctive functions are classified under both headings.

1097. To understand the nature of each instinct, we must investigate its principle, common to all its many subdivisions. This one principle, while remaining always the same, acts in different ways. Otherwise, we could not use the generic epithet 'instinctive' to mean the rational animal functions I have listed and classified.
What then is the principle of instinct and its intimate, immutable nature?

1098. Instinct indicates a mode of the subject's operation, that is, a law according to which the subject acts. To investigate this law is to investigate the principle and nature of instinct.
A subject acting according to this law is said to act instinctively. I mentioned the law when I was discussing animal instinct to which I attributed the 'power of adjusting itself in the most pleasant way.' It will be sufficient, therefore, if I make the observation more general, applying it not simply to animal subjects but to all subjects including rational and intellective subjects. In this way I will have found the one principle of instinct.

1099. I have already established that every subject is a substantial feeling and that every feeling has its own activity. I also demonstrated that this activity continually posits the feeling, whose principle it is, in the most pleasant state possible because the act which adjusts feeling is natural and proper to the activity (activity would not be such unless it had its natural act with which it posits itself and is what it is). But the activity of a feeling can sometimes be passive and dependent on something foreign to itself. This is the case with all finite activities. Such activities or sentient principles are dependent on the nature of their term, which itself is changed by some foreign cause or force. The quality and quantity of this term (foreign to the sentient principle) and its changes are sometimes favourable and sometimes unfavourable to the activation of the principle. They are favourable when they help the sentient principle to carry out some greater activity; unfavourable when they restrain its natural activity and prevent it from carrying out the whole of its natural act. In this case, the activity of the principle struggles against the obstacle.

At this point, we find the most general notion of the pleasant or unpleasant state of a feeling — a notion we have to form. An unpleasant, troublesome, painful feeling is that in which the sentient principle is prevented by the state of its term from carrying out the whole of its natural act. A pleasant feeling is present when the principle carries out without difficulty all its possible activity according to the state of its term, free from any opposition or obstacle. The activity of the sentient principle posited in act is, therefore, essentially pleasure. The degree of pleasure is proportionate to the actuality of the activity and to the way in which the activity is carried out. The essence of feeling, therefore, is pleasure; pain is simply that which forcefully and violently diminishes, suppresses and limits feeling.

1100. If the sentient principle's natural act is to bring about the greatest possible feeling (given the state of the term), it must do this spontaneously, that is, with the very act through which it exists and is a sentient principle. This is the principle of every instinct, and is found in the nature of every substantial feeling, of every subject; it is the activity proper to a subject. For example, why does the instinct for food manifest itself in the animal? Why does this instinct move the animal to carry out all the movements it needs to obtain food? Because these movements are efforts of the sentient principle to feel better, to enjoy a state of fuller and more pleasant feeling. We must not let our imagination restrict us to what we see externally, for example, when a wolf devours a sheep. The wolf's movements, seen extrasubjectively, are simply consequences of internal, subjective action in the wolf.

We must consider the animal feelings which the wolf successively experiences in its actions. These internal feelings are the causes of its exterior movement. Everything the wolf does, it does internally, in its feeling. When I say the wolf does something I simply mean an acting sentient principle which adjusts its feeling in the most pleasant way. External movements which result from an internal process are only consequences relative to our visual faculty and in general to our special sensitivity. We speak about these external phenomena of our particular sensitivity as if the wolf directly and immediately produced them, whereas the wolf's action begins, continues and finishes in its feeling, changing the term of its own feeling (subjective body). This change presents to our vision the movements of the wolf's body (extrasubjective phenomena). These changes in the terms of the wolf's feeling and the changed terms themselves make the wolf act on external bodies (the sheep) as well. That which happens in external bodies forms new relationships with our visual or tactile sensitivity which result in new phenomena, that is, movements and changes taking place in the sheep's body and feelable by us. But I repeat, the real active cause, the first cause of all that happens, is the wolf's sentient principle, which successively adjusts its feeling in different ways until it has completed the task of feeding. Such is the action of instinct.

1101. An act of rational instinct, as we can see, takes place according to the same law. For example, the reason why we feel a natural delight in considering truth is that our rationally- sentient principle has for its pleasant, natural act the apprehension of what is true; we spontaneously apprehend it as best we can and enjoy it.
It is always the subject, the subjective feeling, which adjusts itself in the most pleasant way.

Notes

(89) AMS, 416-494.

(90) Note that the only impediment arousing anger is something foreign and external to the animate body.

(91) Cf. Philosoophy of Right, vol. 2, Rights of the Individual, 921-975.