These, and many more, are just his natural human
ways. He does not of purpose initiate them any more than he initiates
breathing or heart-beat. He does these things because he is so born
and built. They are his instincts."
As Norsworthy and Whitley point out, we are not especially concerned
with the boundary lines between automatic actions, reflexes, and
instincts--we are rather concerned with the fact that human beings
possess native tendencies to act in particular ways. Some psychologists
stress them as instincts; others as capacities, but they have all pretty
generally agreed that under certain stimuli there are natural tendencies
to react.
These tendencies begin to manifest themselves at birth--they are all
potentialities with the birth of the child--and continue to develop in
turn, certain ones being more pronounced in the various stages of the
child's life. Colvin in his _The Learning Process_, runs through the
complete list of possibilities. According to him man, in a lifetime, is
characterized by the following tendencies: Fear, anger, sympathy,
affection, play, imitation, curiosity, acquisitiveness,
constructiveness, self-assertion (leadership), self-abasement, rivalry,
envy, jealousy, pugnacity, clannishness, the hunting and predatory
instincts, the migratory instinct, love of adventure and the unknown,
superstition, the sex instincts, which express themselves in sex-love,
vanity, coquetry, modesty; and, closely allied with these, the love of
nature and of solitude, and the aesthetic, the religious, and the moral
emotions.
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