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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
The problem before us is the question: How far is the term ‘ instinct ‘ applicable in ethics? How far is it true to say that instincts are the determinants of the good, or moral, life? And if it is true at all to say they are determinants, how Far is it true?
page 174 note 1 In the Outline of Psychology the adjective is dropped, or adopted with explanations. See footnote to p. 110.
page 175 note 1 Such instincts William James calls ‘ transitory.’
page 176 note 1 British Journal of Psychology, 1910, p. 267.
page 180 note 1 This is, of course, very different from saying we are innately good, or anything of that sort. The impulse may be innate, but it has to meet with severe competition.
page 181 note 1 It is not an entity standing by itself.
page 182 note 1 We are speaking now of this desire for wholeness, taken by itself, in abstraction. To say that this desire is non-instinctive is not to say that instinct is not present in moral life as a whole. See below, p. 184.
page 182 note 2 There is, I admit, a striking analogy between the human desire for unity and integrity and the seeking by an organism after wholeness so stressed in recent literature by Whitehead, Smuts, and others. If this is an ‘ instinct,’ then certainly our moral desire is more like an instinct than we have been saying. In speaking of ‘ instinct,’ however, I have naturally had in mind the currently accepted use of the term as embodied in the attempted definition given earlier. And further, although this unity-seeking in ourselves is like the unity-seeking in more lowly organisms, and although it may be for some reasons important to stress the continuity of development from one stage to another, the human ‘ hunger and thirst ‘ is so different from what the analogous organic craving must be like that is the reverse of helpful for the understanding of human morality to overstress the resemblance. Rather is the organic craving more comprehensible in the light of our more conscious human cravings.
page 182 note 3 The Rational Good, pp. 48 and 49.
page 185 note 1 In the ordinarily accepted, defined sense.