Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "The Principles of Psychology" in English language version.
So it has come to pass that the instincts of animals are ransacked to throw light on our own; and that the reasoning faculty of bees and ants, the minds of savages, infants, madmen, idiots, and the deaf and blind, criminals, and eccentrics, are all invoked in support of this or that special theory about some part of our own mental life.
Nothing is commoner than the remark that man differs from lower creatures by the almost total absence of instincts, and the assumption of their work in him by 'reason.'
Man has a far greater variety of impulses than any lower animal; and any one of these impulses taken in itself, is as 'blind' as the lowest instinct can be; but owing to man's memory, power of reflection, and power of inference, they come each one to be felt by him after he has once yielded to them and experienced their results, in connection with a foresight of those results.
It is plain then that, no matter how well endowed an animal may originally be in the way of instincts, his resultant actions will be much modified if the instincts combine with experience, if in addition to impulses he have memories associations inferences and expectations on any considerable scale.
