ARTICOLI / 3 / Guido Baggio
Between habit and instinct: the emergence of consciousness in Conwy Lloyd Morgan’s Lowell Lectures
In 1895, British zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan was invited to Boston to give the Lowell Lectures. In that period, he was William James’ host, whose theory of emotion he dedicated part of his lessons. The Lowell Lectures were published the following year with the title Habit and Instinct (1896). At that time, Morgan was dealing with the interplay between hereditary genetic aspects and the role that behavior plays in their variation. He was further developing his observation concerning the behavioral traits of different types of animals that foreshadowed higher organisms’ behaviors. He elaborated An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1894) on these observations, which would later be considered the manifesto of modern comparative psychology and behaviorism. In the Lowell Lectures, Morgan presented some of the results of his studies and observations on animal behavior to argue that the relationship between organic and mental evolution is based on the interaction between inborn instincts and inherited habits.
