Instinct and experience

Abstract

In the summer of 1910 a symposium on the subject of Instinct and Intelligence was held in London at a joint meeting of the Aristotelian and British Psychological Societies and of the Mind association. Considerable interest in the discussion was shown both in the room in which we met and beyond its walls. The papers then taken as read, and subsequently published in the "British Journal of Psychology," disclose not a little divergence in the sense in which the terms instinctive and intelligent are used, an underlying divergence in the principles on which the proffered interpretations are based, and indications, more or less clear, of yet deeper-seated differences of philosophical foundation.