PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

_Op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 390.] "every instinctive act in an animal
with memory must cease to be 'blind' after being once repeated."
Whatever the equipment at birth, the innate dispositions are from
earliest infancy immersed in experience which determines what shall
excite them as stimulus. "They become capable," as Mr. McDougall
says, [Footnote: Introduction to _Social Psychology_, Fourth
Edition, pp. 31-32.] "of being initiated, not only by the perception
of objects of the kind which directly excite the innate disposition,
the natural or native excitants of the instinct, but also by ideas of
such objects, and by perceptions and by ideas of objects of other
kinds." [Footnote: "Most definitions of instincts and instinctive
actions take account only of their conative aspects... and it is a
common mistake to ignore the cognitive and affective aspects of the
instinctive mental process." Footnote _op. cit._, p. 29.]
It is only the "central part of the disposition" [Footnote: p. 34.]
says Mr. McDougall further, "that retains its specific character and
remains common to all individuals and all situations in which the
instinct is excited." The cognitive processes, and the actual bodily
movements by which the instinct achieves its end may be indefinitely
complicated. In other words, man has an instinct of fear, but what he
will fear and how he will try to escape, is determined not from birth,
but by experience.
If it were not for this variability, it would be difficult to conceive
the inordinate variety of human nature. But when you consider that all
the important tendencies of the creature, his appetites, his loves,
his hates, his curiosity, his sexual cravings, his fears, and
pugnacity, are freely attachable to all sorts of objects as stimulus,
and to all kinds of objects as gratification, the complexity of human
nature is not so inconceivable. And when you think that each new
generation is the casual victim of the way a previous generation was
conditioned, as well as the inheritor of the environment that
resulted, the possible combinations and permutations are enormous.
There is no prima facie case then for supposing that because persons
crave some particular thing, or behave in some particular way, human
nature is fatally constituted to crave that and act thus. The craving
and the action are both learned, and in another generation might be
learned differently. Analytic psychology and social history unite in
supporting this conclusion. Psychology indicates how essentially
casual is the nexus between the particular stimulus and the particular
response. Anthropology in the widest sense reinforces the view by
demonstrating that the things which have excited men's passions, and
the means which they have used to realize them, differ endlessly from
age to age and from place to place.
Men pursue their interest. But how they shall pursue it is not fatally