GENERAL CONTROLS OF CONDUCT 5
sion of acquired characters from one generation to another. How else could a race consisting of a succession of distinct persons acquire a habit? But the weight of scientific opin ion is decidedly against this assumption. It is, therefore, better not to speak of instincts as racial habits, notwithstand ing the very obvious superficial likeness ; for they seem to constitute a class of phenomena quite different from habits. One of the characteristic marks of a habit is that it is not transmissible by heredity, whereas one of the most char acteristic marks of an instinct is that it is hereditary. A habit is acquired in and by individual experience ; an instinct is given at the beginning of experience certainly so far as the individual is concerned. The problem of the origin and perpetuation of instincts, since they are racial traits, is one with the origin and perpetuation of species; and these are problems which do not come within the scope of a psycho logical discussion, though they do have a most important bearing upon the philosophical interpretation of the in stincts.
But important for this discussion are the facts that they are racial traits, that they are inherited and that they are the most significant controls of conduct with which the in dividual begins his career in the world. There are, how ever, individual variations in instincts. The same instincts are far from being equally strong in different individuals, though they are all present in all normal examples of the species. The instinct of flight, for instance, is very strong in some, and very weak in others; and so with all the in stincts. One instinct may be dominant in one, and a quite different instinct dominant in another individual; and by reason of the dominancy of one or another of the instincts, the same stimulus may provoke a different instinctive re sponse in different individuals. The situation which pro duces self-abasement in one may excite self-assertion in an other. The fact of individual variation in the strength of the instincts is too much a matter of every-day observa tion to require emphasis here.
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