ed with the performance of specific
actions. We are, in the vast majority of cases, prompted
to specific responses, not by any mathematical considerations
of pleasures and pains, but by the immediate urgency of
instinctive and habitual desires. Reflection arises in the
process of adjustment of competing impulses, in the effecting of
a harmony between various desires that are much more primary
and fundamental than the reflection that arises upon
them. We may largely agree with McDougall when he writes:

[Footnote 3: The hedonic calculus of Bentham was, briefly, the
following: "Every proposed act is to be viewed with reference
to its probable consequences, in (1) intensity of pleasures and
pains, (2) their duration, (3) their certainty or uncertainty,
(4) their nearness or remoteness, (5) their fecundity, _i.e._,
the tendency of a pleasure to be followed by others, or a pain
by other pains; (6) their purity, _i.e._, the tendency of a
pleasure to be followed by pains and _vice versa_; (7) their extent,
that is, the number or range of persons whose happiness is
affected--with reference to whose pleasures and pains each one of
the first six items ought in strictness also to be calculated.
Then sum up all the pleasures which stand to the credit side of
the account; add the pains which are the debit items, or liabilities,
on the other; then take their algebraic sum, and the balance of
it on the side of pleasure will be the good tendency of the act
upon the whole." (Dewey and Tufts: _Ethics_, pp. 275-76.)

We may say, then, that directly or indirectly, the instincts are the
prime movers of all human activity; by the conative or impulsive
force of some instinct (or of some habit derived from an instinct)
every train of thought, however cold and passionless it may seem,
is borne along towards its end, and every bodily activity is initiated
and sustained. The instinctive impulses determine the ends of all
activities and supply the driving power by which all mental activities
are sustained; and all the complex intellectual apparatus of the most
highly developed mind is but a means towards these ends, is but the
instrument by which these impulses seek their satisfactions, while
pleasure and pain do but serve to guide them in their choice of the
means.

Take away these instinctive dispositions with their powerful impulses,
and the organism would become incapable of activity of
any kind; it would lie inert and motionless, like a