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Conwy Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936)

Lloyd Morgan did two things that outlived him, one in each half of his career. As a founder of comparative psychology he laid down the rule that an animal’s behaviour should not be explained by a higher mental faculty where a lower one will do, the principle known as Morgan’s canon, and he helped put the study of animal minds on an experimental footing. Late in life he gave the idea of emergence its evolutionary form: in Emergent Evolution (1923) evolution is the successive appearance of genuinely new qualities, life out of matter and mind out of life, each resting on what came before and none predictable from it. With Samuel Alexander he was one of the two principals of emergent evolution.

Conwy Lloyd Morgan was born in London on 6 February 1852. He studied at the Royal School of Mines, where he came under the influence of T. H. Huxley, and taught for several years in Cape Town. In 1884 he became professor of geology and zoology at University College, Bristol, was its principal from 1891, and in 1909 became the first vice-chancellor of the new University of Bristol, returning after a year to a chair of psychology and ethics that he held until 1919. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1899. He gave the Gifford Lectures at St Andrews in 1921–23, published as Emergent Evolution (1923) and Life, Mind and Spirit (1925). He died in Hastings on 6 March 1936.

Key concepts

Morgan’s canon. In An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1894) he set out the principle that bears his name: “In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher mental faculty, if it can be interpreted as the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.” It was aimed at the anecdotal method of his predecessors, George Romanes among them, which credited animals with reasoning on the strength of striking stories. Morgan’s own example was his fox terrier Tony, who learned to open a garden gate: an observer seeing only the result might credit him with understanding the latch, but Morgan, having watched the learning, saw a long series of chance successes gradually fixed by trial and error.

Experiment on instinct and habit. In Habit and Instinct (1896) Morgan reported his experiments with chicks, ducklings and moorhens hatched in incubators, raised without adults, to separate what an animal does from birth from what it learns by experience. The work helped establish comparative psychology as an experimental science.

Organic selection. In the same year, independently of James Mark Baldwin and Henry Fairfield Osborn, he proposed that behaviour learned in a lifetime can steer natural selection, so that inborn variations which reproduce the learned adaptation are favoured, without the inheritance of anything acquired (see Lamarck and the inheritance of acquired characters).

Emergent evolution. Emergent Evolution distinguished resultant effects, which can be predicted from their components, from emergent ones, which cannot, and read the course of evolution as a series of emergents: new kinds of relatedness among existing events, appearing at critical points and giving rise to new qualities that the lower levels could not have foretold. Morgan took the word “emergent” from G. H. Lewes and acknowledged Alexander as his partner in the view. Unlike Alexander, he framed the series religiously as well as naturally: the emergent course was the expression of a directing Activity, which he identified with God.

Where Morgan stops

The canon has been pressed from two sides. Elliott Sober argued (2005) that it lacks a justification of its own, since a preference for lower faculties is not the same as a preference for simpler explanations and needs independent grounds, and Frans de Waal has argued that its routine application produces a bias he calls anthropodenial, the refusal to credit animals with capacities humans share with them. Historians of psychology have also pointed out that Morgan himself qualified the canon in 1903, adding that it does not exclude higher interpretations where there is independent evidence for the higher faculty.

Brian McLaughlin (1992) judged the empirical case of British emergentism, Morgan’s included, undercut by the quantum explanation of chemical bonding; the argument is set out under Alexander and Emergence.

Key works

Animal Life and Intelligence (1890–91)
An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1894; revised 1903)
Habit and Instinct (1896)
Emergent Evolution (Gifford Lectures 1921–22; 1923)
Life, Mind and Spirit (Gifford Lectures 1922–23; 1925)
The Emergence of Novelty (1933)