(p. 318). This restlessness is something other than the rehearsal of an inherited repertoire of responses, such as Thorndike has appealed to. It is "the power of the organism to persist in seeking for new adjustments whether the environment at first suggests them or not, to persist in struggling toward its wholly unknown goal, whether there is any apparent opportunity for reaching such a goal or not." This restlessness may reach the intensity of an independent passion, as in the absorption of play or of invention; it is at the basis of all our current selective attention, so far as its quantity of persistence is concerned (p. 328). And as for its organic basis, it "depends upon vital activities which are as elemental as the 'tropisms' of the organisms upon which Loeb experimented" (p. 327; see also the preface). It may be called simply a "general instinct to persist in trying."
We can hardly agree in classing with the tropisms of Loeb a tendency or set of tendencies so non-specific in direction that their goal can be called 'wholly unknown,' save indeed for the fact that it is something novel, i.e., something not identical with what is already familiar. Such an impulse (a negative iso-tropism?) would be open to the criticism of McDougall upon the possibility of an organic basis for curiosity.[1] But apart from this, the 'instinct to persist in trying' cannot be identical with the principle of selection which we seek, because of this same absence of content or direction. It would appear, of itself, to imply a still deeper and positive 'tropism'; for unless we are ready to say that the restlessness in question is purely a distaste of the old because it is old, or purely a love of action for the sake of being in action, it would be naturally explained as a case of the 'negative after-image' above described, a recognition that the self
- ↑ "This instinct is excited not by any simple sense-impressions, nor yet by any specific complex of sense-impressions; for there is no one class of objects to which it is especially directed or in the presence of which it is invariably displayed. ... In short, the condition of excitement of the impulse of curiosity seems to be in all cases the presence of a strange or unfamiliar element in whatever is partly familiar, whether the object be one of sense-perception (as exclusively in the animals and very young children), or one contemplated in thought only. In either case the element of strangeness ... is something which exists only for the organism, ... and is, in fact, the meaning of the object for the organism in so far as curiosity is awakened." (William McDougall. Body and Mind, pp. 266f.)
