56 SCIENCE is one of the fields in which it is still possible to do a certain amount of loose thinking with impunity. I may hope to return sufficiently intact to proceed with the discussion. It is often supposed that the investigator enters his laboratory full of instruments and glassware and proceeds, with the use of this equipment, his sense organs and his carefully controlled ratiocinative powers to excogitate the discoveries which our newspaper editors occasionally deign to distort for the benefit of the readers of their Sunday supplements. But every investigator who observes his own activities or those of other investigators knows that this is, to say the least, a very inadequate account of the process, and every psychologist knows that while the proper employment of the senses and the reasoning powers is extremely important, the real "drives" are the instincts, emotions and interests, or what some authors prefer to call in more anæmic terms, the propensities, conative tendencies, sentiments or dispositions. To the biologist, who takes a behavioristic view of the instincts, it is difficult to single out the various drives that initiate, determine and sustain such intricate activities as those leading to scientific discovery and invention, and the far from psychologists themselves are unanimous on this matter. The list submitted in the sequel is, therefore, merely an approximation to the true state of affairs, though it is probably adequate for the purpose I have in mind. To merit the designation of human instincts, in the conventional sense, tendencies or dispositions must be innate and purposive, common to all the normal individuals of our species, less overlaid or camouflaged by habits and therefore more evident in the young than in the adult and represented by similar though more rudi mentary tendencies in the higher 1. Curiosity, which seems to be c 2. The hunting instinct, which marily nutritive in animals and rem very largely in savages. In childr adults of civilized man it persists form of sport and the love of rapid ment in such intensity that it is to the extinction of our native faur an enormous development of the a bile industry, while in the investig the word itself means followers of mal's spoor-such as zoologists, 4"An Introduction to Social Psycholog ton, Luce & Co., 1910, p. 59. ogists and explorers it is too apparent to require discussion. It is not lacking, however, in other investigators, all of whom when too old or too lazy to hunt their accustomed prey in the open, delight to sit and hunt for the opinions of others and especially for confirmation of their own opinions, in comfortably heated libraries. 3. The acquisitive, collecting or hoarding instinct, also primarily nutritive in animals and savages, but modified in children and adults of civilized peoples, in whom it manifests itself in the most extraordinary form of amassing all sorts of objects, from newspaper clippings and cigarbands to meerschaum pipes and shaving mugs. It is unnecessary to dwell on its truly monomaniacal manifestations among zoologists and botanists, who collect everything from mites to whales and from bacteria to sequoias. But even those who look down with contempt on the enthusiastic collectors of bird-lice or coprolites are themselves usually addicted to collecting so-called data or statistics. The significant difference between the mere magpie-like collector and the hamster-like investigator lies, of course, in the use made of the accumulated objects. 4. The instinct of workmanship, craftsmanship or contrivance, which also has its phylogenetic roots in the constructive activities of very many animals. In man it begins ontogenetically with the making of mud-pies and may lead to such achievements as the excavation of the Panama Canal or the construction of an airship. It is, as Veblen" and others have shown, an instinct of the greatest importance. In the investigator it is seen in the inventing of methods and devices and the construction of apparatus and hypotheses, and "The Instinct of Workmanship," N. Y., B. W. Huebsch, 1918. 1 reaches its highest manifestations in flights of the creative imagination. The four instincts I have been very briefly considering might be called individual to distinguish them from four others which are more deeply rooted in the social life of the investigator. These are: 5. Emulation. The decision as to whether this may be traced among animals to competition for food or for mates may be left to Jung and Freud and their respective disciples. According to William James, emulation is "a very intense instinct, especially rife with young children or at least especially undisguised. Every one knows it. Nine tenths of the work of the world is done by it. We know that if we do not do the task some one else will do it and get the credit, so we do it." It is powerful and elaborately conditioned in investigators and perhaps the less said about it the better. The word "priority" will conjure up in your minds a sufficient number of emotionally toned ideas to meet the needs of this discussion. 6. What for lack of a better term I shall call the instinct of communication. It seems to have its roots in the behavior of those more or less gregarious or social animals, which apprise one another by signs or sounds of the presence of danger, of food or of certain sexual states. Its manifestations may be said to range from birds to the invention of language and the the chirping of crickets, tree frogs and effusions of poetry and music, both vocal and instrumental. In both the old and the young of our species it appears also as gossip and divulge secrets, to communicate the by no means sex-limited impulse to news and rumors, much information and no little misinformation. It urges the investigator to communicate the results of 6"The Principles of Psychology," N. Y., Holt & Co., Vol. 2, p. 409. 58 his activities to learned societies and to publish those results to the world or at least to a select coterie of specialists. The strength of this instinct might be tested by passing stringent laws forbidding certain investigators from attending scientific meetings or publishing anything for long periods of time or during their life-time or even posthumously. The results of such experimental repression might be illuminating but I refrain from speculating on their nature. 7. Closely connected with this instinct of communication is the craving for sympathy and appreciation so clearly exhib ited by most highly social animals and so undisguisedly shown by children. Most investigators exhibit such a moderate development of this craving that they seem to be quite satisfied with the good opinion of the workers in their own specialties. But even if more appreciation were demanded the individual investigator would stand little chance of obtaining it, for investigators have become so numerous and the field of their labors has been so vastly expanded through their own enthusiastic efforts and so thickly overgrown with a dense crop of technicalities of their own sowing and cultivation, that most of them can be known only to those who are working in the same or adjoining furrows. 8. The instinct of cooperation-also very evident and of far-reaching significance in gregarious and social animals and manifested in the team-play of young human beings and the innumerable associations of adults. In many investigators this instinct seeems to be rather feeble but may still appear at least in the ambition to figure in the rôle of an honest hod-carrier in the erection of some small fragment of the great edifice of human knowledge. In others it may be sufficiently developed to constitute a powerful drive to the inven tion of labor-saving devices and machiner methods of preventing disease and increa ing longevity and mental and physic efficiency. 1 T This list is probably incomplete, but I b lieve that it comprises at least the more i portant drives of the investigator. special trend of his activities is, no dou further determined by his native capa ties, but the psychological problem as whether or not these also constitute driv as Woodworth' maintains and McDouga denies, I shall not attempt to discuss. T point I wish to emphasize is that the s cific activities of the investigator depe primarily and preeminently on his stincts, emotions, interests and native dowments. If we turn now to a survey of investig tors in general we find that they can be .vided into two classes, usually called th retical and practical, or pure and appli The term pure is, to say the least, son what priggish, since it seems to imply t its alternative is more or less contaminat and theoretical and practical are unsa factory because all investigation is nec sarily both. I prefer, therefore, to des nate the two classes as discoverers a inventors, since the former are primar interested in increasing our knowledge our environment and of ourselves, the lat in increasing our power over our envir ment and ourselves. From the very nat of this distinction it follows that the coverer pursues more general, more th retical and therefore more remote ai whereas the inventor, in the very br sense in which I am using the term, bus himself with more special, more pract and therefore more immediate proble 7 "Dynamic Psychology," N. Y., Columbia U Press, 1918, pp. 66 et seq. 8"Motives in the Light of Recent Discussio Mind, 29, N. S., 1920, pp. 277-293, As both types of investigation are equally essential to the fullest spiritual and economic exploitation of the universe, no society can attain to a high level of culture unless it provides impartially both for its discoverers and its inventors. There is another classification of investigators which will be useful for the purposes of my argument-namely, into professionals and amateurs. I am, of course, using these words in their good sense, not with the evil connotations that have grown up around them. It is clear that both may suffer from certain disabilities, the professional from well-known guild restrictions, the amateur from lack of opportunity or equipment or of the lively interchange of ideas so necessary to the most fruitful type of investigation. Both, too, have their advantages, the professional in the support and advertisement of his guild-fellows, the amateur in the freedom to choose and delimit his own problems, to work on them in his own way and to publish when he sees fit. These distinctions did not escape that clever old fox, Samuel Butler, who says:" There is no excuse for amateur work being bad. Amateurs often excuse their shortcomings on the ground that they are not professionals, the professional could plead with greater justice that he is not an amateur. The professional has not, he might well say, the leisure and freedom from money anxieties which will let him devote himself to his art in singleness of heart, telling of things as he sees them without fear of what man shall say unto him; he must think not of what appears to him right and lovable but of what his patrons will think and of what the critics will tell his patrons to say they think; he has got to square every one all round and will assuredly fail to make his way unless he does this; if, then, he betrays his trust he does so under temptation. Whereas the amateur who works with no higher aim than that of immediate recognition betrays it from the vanity "The Notebooks of Samuel Butler." Edited by H. F. Jones. N. Y., E. P. Dutton & Co., 1917, p. 145. and wantonness of his spirit. The one is naughty because he is needy, the other from natural depravity. Besides the amateur can keep his work to himself, whereas the professional man must exhibit or starve. Contrasting the professional and amateur, to the advantage of the latter, was also a favorite pastime with that irritable old bear, Schopenhauer.10 He compared the professionals with dogs, the amateurs with wolves, but he was not always consistent zoologically, for he sometimes thought of the professionals as cattle, as e.g., when he says: On the whole, the stall-feeding of our professorships is most suitable for ruminants, but those who receive their prey from the hands of Nature, live best in the open. At present the terms professional and amateur seem to have fallen into disuse among scientists, for reasons that are not far to seek. We know that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the books and apparatus necessary for the prosecution of research were so meager as to be within the reach of men of very moderate means, amateurs were able to do a vast amount of important work in all the departments of science. This was particularly true in England and America. In England we have a teacher of music, Wm. Herschel, making great discoveries in astronomy; a stone-cutter, Hugh Miller, in geology; a Nottingham cobbler, George Green, in mathematics; a grocer of Ightham, Harrison, and a jeweller of St. Leonards, W. J. L. Abbott, in archeology, and a country gentleman, Charles Darwin, in biology. There were men like John Hunter, Lyall, Wallace, Galton, Samuel Butler, Lubbock, Bates and a host of other eminent investigators, who really belonged to the class of amateurs. Till very recently whole sciences, such as taxonomy and 10 Loco citato, Vol. 6, p. 519. 60 zoogeography, entomology and genetics a portion of his leisure hours with the joy of research. The disuse of the words professional an amateur is also, no doubt, due to the fa that the two kinds of investigators can longer be sharply distinguished. Not on are the biologists in our universities a museums frequently recruited from t ranks of the amateurs, but as investigato in those institutions many of them rema amateurs in spirit and merely exercise t teaching and curatorial professions becau they can be more conveniently carried in conjunction with research than mo lucrative professions such as undertaki and plumbing. There is no reason to su pose that the number of amateur inves gators may not greatly increase under more favorable form of society. In t ideal commonwealth of the future it m not be in the least surprising to find th the communal furnace-man, after his fo hour day, is conducting elaborate inves an acknowledg gations in paleobotany, and that the co munal laundress is munal authority on colloidal chemistry. Now if the preceding very hasty beh ioristic account is accurate we must ad that it would be difficult to find a body men more unfavorable for purposes of ganization, even by a committee of th own class, than the investigators. Ma reasons might be given in support of t statement, but I shall consider only the lowing four: 1. The activities of the investigator pend as we have seen, on an array of stincts, emotions and interests, many which are so positive that their organ tion in the sense in which organizers using the term, is out of the question. is possible, of course, to overstimulate, press, pervert and exploit instincts they are undoubtedly able to orga |