C. Lloyd Morgan, F.R.S., (1852-1936) Habit and Instinct (1896)
Chapter XV. Heredity in man
...There is, however, one more aspect of the problems of heredity and acquisition to which attention must be directed before passing from the life of animals to the life of man. There are two important processes which fall under the head of acquisition. We acquire experience, and we acquire skill.
The first involves the correlation of incoming data from the special senses, from the motor organs, and from the viscera. The second implies the more or less accurate co-ordination of outgoing impulses to the viscera and to the motor organs, both those concerned in ministering to sensation and those concerned in general activity. If, then, the term “experience” be applied to the correlation of incoming data from whatever source, it would appear that such experience is wholly a matter of acquisition. To illustrate once more by a very simple case, if nasty taste or the power of stinging be associated with colour or form in a caterpillar or insect, there appears to be no inherited transmission of such an association in experience; no inherited suggestion of the taste on sight of the colour or form. The associative foundations of suggestion have to be laid in individual experience, and are solely a matter of acquisition. Heredity seems to have nothing to do with them save to supply the requisite faculty. On the other hand, the co-ordination of outgoing impulses may be and often is congenitally definite. But it may be, and often is, the result of individual acquisition. Whereas, therefore, experience is in all cases acquired; motor co-ordination is in some cases congenital, and in other cases acquired. If this conclusion stand the test of further investigation and critical study, it will afford an important line of demarcation. We may expect to find further and fuller evidence of inherited co-ordinations of a markedly definite kind; but we must not expect to find any evidence of inherited knowledge. Co-ordination may be in a surprisingly definite manner instinctive; but knowledge, and that correlated experience which is its precursor, though founded on innate faculty, owes all its definiteness and exactitude to individual experience.