Wherever the mind is elevated enough to discriminate; wherever several

distinct sensory elements must combine to discharge the reflex-arc;

wherever, instead of plumping into action instantly at the first rough

intimation of what _sort_ of a thing is there, the agent waits to see

which _one_ of its kind it is and what the _circumstances_ are of its

appearance; wherever different individuals and different circumstances

can impel him in different ways; wherever these are the conditions--we

have a masking of the elementary constitution of the instinctive life.

The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is the

history of our taking advantage of the way in which they judge of

everything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill

them. Nature, in them, has left matters in this rough way, and made

them act _always_ in the manner which would be _oftenest_ right. There

are more worms unattached to hooks than impaled upon them; therefore,

on the whole, says Nature to her fishy children, bite at _every_ worm

and take your chances. But as her children get higher, and their lives

more precious, she reduces the risks. Since what seems to be the same

object may be now a genuine food and now a bait; since in gregarious

species each individual may prove to be either the friend or the rival,

according to the circumstances, of another; since any entirely unknown

object may be fraught with weal or woe, _Nature implants contrary

impulses to act on many classes of things,_ and leaves it to slight

alterations in the conditions of the individual case to decide which

impulse shall carry the day. Thus, greediness and suspicion, curiosity

and timidity, coyness and desire, bashfulness and vanity, sociability

and pugnacity, seem to shoot over into each other as quickly, and to

remain in as unstable equilibrium, in the higher birds and mammals

as in man. They are all impulses, congenital, blind at first, and

productive of motor reactions of a rigorously determinate sort. _Each

one of them, then, is an instinct_, as instincts are commonly defined.

_But they contradict each other_--'experience' in each particular

opportunity of application usually deciding the issue. _The animal

that exhibits them, loses the 'instinctive' demeanor_ and appears to

lead a life of hesitation and choice, an intellectual life; _not,

however, because he has no instincts--rather because he has so many

that they block each other's path._

Thus, then, without troubling ourselves about the words instinct

and reason, we may confidently say that however uncertain man's

reactions upon his environment may sometimes seem in comparison with

those of lower creatures, the uncertainty is probably not due to

their possession of any principles of action which he lacks. _On the

contrary, man possesses all the impulses that they have, and a great

many more besides._ In other words, there is no material antagonism

between instinct and reason. Reason, _per se_, can inhibit no impulses;

the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other

way. Reason may, however, make an _inference which will excite the

imagination so as to set loose_ the impulse the other way; and thus,

though the animal richest in reason might be also the animal richest in

instinctive impulses too, he would never seem the fatal automaton which

a _merely_ instinctive animal would be.

* * * * *

Let us now turn to human impulses with a little more detail. All we

have ascertained so far is that impulses of an originally instinctive

character may exist, and yet not betray themselves by automatic

fatality of conduct. But in man what impulses do exist? In the light

of what has been said, it is obvious that an existing impulse may not

always be superficially apparent even when its object is there. And we

shall see that some impulses may be masked by causes of which we have

not yet spoken.

TWO PRINCIPLES OF NON-UNIFORMITY IN INSTINCTS.

Were one devising an abstract scheme, nothing would be easier than to

discover from an animal's actions just how many instincts he possessed.

He would react in one way only upon each class of objects with which

his life had to deal; he would react in identically the same way upon

every specimen of a class; and he would react invariably during his

whole life. There would be no gaps among his instincts; all would

come to light without perversion or disguise. But there are no such

abstract animals, and nowhere does the instinctive life display itself

in such a way. Not only, as we have seen, may objects of the same class

arouse reactions of opposite sorts in consequence of slight changes in

the circumstances, in the individual object, or in the agent's inward

condition; but two other principles of which we have not yet spoken,

may come into play and produce results so striking that observers as

eminent as Messrs. D. A. Spalding and Romanes do not hesitate to call

them 'derangements of the mental constitution,' and to conclude that

the instinctive machinery has got out of gear.

These principles are those

1. Of the _inhibition of instincts by habits_; and

2. Of the _transitoriness of instincts_.

Taken in conjunction with the two former principles--that the same

object may excite ambiguous impulses, or _suggest_ an impulse different

from that which it _excites_, by suggesting a remote object--they

explain any amount of departure from uniformity of conduct, without

implying any getting out of gear of the elementary impulses from which

the conduct flows.

* * * * *

1. The law of inhibition of instincts by habits is this: _When objects

of a certain class elicit from an animal a certain sort of reaction, it

often happens that the animal becomes partial to the first specimen of

the class on which it has reacted, and will not afterward react on any

other specimen._

The selection of a particular hole to live in, of a particular mate, of

a particular feeding-ground, a particular variety of diet, a particular

anything, in short, out of a possible multitude, is a very wide-spread

tendency among animals, even those low down in the scale. The limpet

will return to the same sticking-place in its rock, and the lobster

to its favorite nook on the sea-bottom. The rabbit will deposit its

dung in the same corner; the bird makes its nest on the same bough.

But each of these preferences carries with it an insensibility to

_other_ opportunities and occasions--an insensibility which can only

be described physiologically as an inhibition of new impulses by the

habit of old ones already formed. The possession of homes and wives of

our own makes us strangely insensible to the charms of those of other

people. Few of us are adventurous in the matter of food; in fact, most

of us think there is something disgusting in a bill of fare to which we

are unused. Strangers, we are apt to think, cannot be worth knowing,

especially if they come from distant cities, etc. The original impulse

which got us homes, wives, dietaries, and friends at all, seems to

exhaust itself in its first achievements and to leave no surplus energy

for reacting on new cases. And so it comes about that, witnessing

this torpor, an observer of mankind might say that no _instinctive_

propensity toward certain objects existed at all. It existed, but it

existed _miscellaneously_, or as an instinct pure and simple, only

before habit was formed. A habit, once grafted on an instinctive

tendency, restricts the range of the tendency itself, and keeps us from

reacting on any but the habitual object, although other objects might

just as well have been chosen had they been the first-comers.

Another sort of arrest of instinct by habit is where the same class of

objects awakens contrary instinctive impulses. Here the impulse first

followed toward a given individual of the class is apt to keep him from

ever awakening the opposite impulse in us. In fact, the whole class

may be protected by this individual specimen from the application to

it of the other impulse. Animals, for example, awaken in a child the

opposite impulses of fearing and fondling. But if a child, in his first

attempts to pat a dog, gets snapped at or bitten, so that the impulse

of fear is strongly aroused, it may be that for years to come no dog

will excite in him the impulse to fondle again. On the other hand, the

greatest natural enemies, if carefully introduced to each other when

young and guided at the outset by superior authority, settle down into

those 'happy families' of friends which we see in our menageries. Young

animals, immediately after birth, have no instinct of fear, but show

their dependence by allowing themselves to be freely handled. Later,

however, they grow 'wild,' and, if left to themselves, will not let

man approach them. I am told by farmers in the Adirondack wilderness

that it is a very serious matter if a cow wanders off and calves in

the woods and is not found for a week or more. The calf, by that time,

is as wild and almost as fleet as a deer, and hard to capture without

violence. But calves rarely show any particular wildness to the men who

have been in contact with them during the first days of their life,

when the instinct to attach themselves is uppermost, nor do they dread

strangers as they would if brought up wild.

Chickens give a curious illustration of the same law. Mr. Spalding's

wonderful article on instinct shall supply us with the facts. These

little creatures show opposite instincts of attachment and fear, either

of which may be aroused by the same object, man. If a chick is born in

the absence of the hen, it

"will follow any moving object. And, when guided by sight alone, they

seem to have no more disposition to follow a hen than to follow a duck

or a human being. Unreflecting lookers-on, when they saw chickens

a day old running after me," says Mr. Spalding, "and older ones

following me for miles, and answering to my whistle, imagined that I

must have some occult power over the creatures: whereas I had simply

allowed them to follow me from the first. There is the instinct to

follow; and the ear, prior to experience, attaches them to the right

object."[365]

But if a man presents himself for the first time when the instinct of

_fear_ is strong, the phenomena are altogether reversed. Mr. Spalding

kept three chickens hooded until they were nearly four days old, and

thus describes their behavior:

"Each of them, on being unhooded, evinced the greatest terror to me,

dashing off in the opposite direction whenever I sought to approach

it. The table on which they were unhooded stood before a window, and

each in its turn beat against the window like a wild bird. One of

them darted behind some books, and, squeezing itself into a corner,

remained cowering for a length of time. We might guess at the meaning

of this strange and exceptional wildness; but the odd fact is enough

for my present purpose. Whatever might have been the meaning of this

marked change in their mental constitution--had they been unhooded

on the previous day they would have run to me instead of from me--it

could not have been the effect of experience; it must have resulted

wholly from changes in their own organizations."[366]

Their case was precisely analogous to that of the Adirondack calves.

The two opposite instincts relative to the same object ripen in

succession. If the first one engenders a habit, that habit will inhibit

the application of the second instinct to that object. All animals

are tame during the earliest phase of their infancy. Habits formed

then limit the effects of whatever instincts of wildness may later be

evolved.

Mr. Romanes gives some very curious examples of the way in which

instinctive tendencies may be altered by the habits to which their

first 'objects' have given rise. The cases are a little more

complicated than those mentioned in the text, inasmuch as the object

reacted on not only starts a habit which inhibits other kinds of

impulse toward it (although such other kinds might be natural), but

even modifies by its own peculiar conduct the constitution of the

impulse which it actually awakens.

Two of the instances in question are those of hens who hatched out

broods of chicks after having (in three previous years) hatched ducks.

They strove to coax or to compel their new progeny to enter the water,

and seemed much perplexed at their unwillingness. Another hen adopted

a brood of young ferrets which, having lost their mother, were put

under her. During all the time they were left with her she had to sit

on the nest, for they could not wander like young chicks. She obeyed

their hoarse growling as she would have obeyed her chickens' peep. She

combed out their hair with her bill, and "used frequently to stop and

look with one eye at the wriggling nestful, with an inquiring gaze,

expressive of astonishment." At other times she would fly up with a

loud scream, doubtless because the orphans had nipped her in their

search for teats. Finally, a Brahma hen nursed a young peacock during

the enormous period of _eighteen months_, and never laid any eggs

during all this time. The abnormal degree of pride which she showed in

her wonderful chicken is described by Dr. Romanes as ludicrous.[367]

2. This leads us to the _law of transitoriness_, which is this: _Many

instincts ripen at a certain age and then fade away._ A consequence of

this law is that if, during the time of such an instinct's vivacity,

objects adequate to arouse it are met with, a _habit_ of acting on

them is formed, which remains when the original instinct has passed

away; but that if no such objects are met with, then no habit will

be formed; and, later on in life, when the animal meets the objects,

he will altogether fail to react, as at the earlier epoch he would

instinctively have done.

No doubt such a law is restricted. Some instincts are far

less transient than others--those connected with feeding and

'self-preservation' may hardly be transient at all, and some, after

fading out for a time, recur as strong as ever, e.g., the instincts of

pairing and rearing young. The law, however, though not absolute, is

certainly very widespread, and a few examples will illustrate just what

it means.

In the chickens and calves above mentioned, it is obvious that the

instinct to follow and become attached fades out after a few days, and

that the instinct of flight then takes its place, the conduct of the

creature toward man being decided by the formation or non-formation

of a certain habit during those days. The transiency of the chicken's

instinct to follow is also proved by its conduct toward the hen. Mr.

Spalding kept some chickens shut up till they were comparatively old,

and, speaking of these, he says:

"A chicken that has not heard the call of the mother till until eight

or ten days old then hears it as if it heard it not. I regret to

find that on this point my notes are not so full as I could wish,

or as they might have been. There is, however, an account of one

chicken that could not be returned to the mother when ten days old.

The hen followed it, and tried to entice it in every way; still, it

continually left her and ran to the house or to any person of whom it

caught sight. This it persisted in doing, though beaten back with a

small branch dozens of times, and, indeed, cruelly maltreated. It was

also placed under the mother at night, but it again left her in the

morning."

The instinct of sucking is ripe in all mammals at birth, and leads to

that habit of taking the breast which, in the human infant, may be

prolonged by daily exercise long beyond its usual term of a year or

a year and a half. But the instinct itself is transient, in the sense

that if, for any reason, the child be fed by spoon during the first few

days of its life and not put to the breast, it may be no easy matter

after that to make it suck at all. So of calves. If their mother die,

or be dry, or refuse to let them suck for a day or two, so that they

are fed by hand, it becomes hard to get them to suck at all when a new

nurse is provided. The ease with which sucking creatures are weaned, by

simply breaking the habit and giving them food in a new way, shows that

the instinct, purely as such, must be entirely extinct.

Assuredly the simple fact that instincts are transient, and that the

effect of later ones may be altered by the habits which earlier ones

have left behind, is a far more philosophical explanation than the

notion of an instinctive constitution vaguely 'deranged' or 'thrown out

of gear.'

I have observed a Scotch terrier, born on the floor of a stable in

December, and transferred six weeks later to a carpeted house, make,

when he was less than four months old, a very elaborate pretence of

burying things, such as gloves, etc., with which he had played till

he was tired. He scratched the carpet with his forefeet, dropped the

object from his mouth upon the spot, and then scratched all about it

(with both fore-and hind-feet, if I remember rightly), and finally went

away and let it lie. Of course, the act was entirely useless. I saw him

perform it at that age, some four or five times, and never again in

his life. The conditions were not present to fix a habit which should

last when the prompting instinct died away. But suppose meat instead

of a glove, earth instead of a carpet, hunger-pangs instead of a fresh

supper a few hours later, and it is easy to see how this dog might have

got into a habit of burying superfluous food, which might have lasted

all his life. Who can swear that the strictly instructive part of the

food-burying propensity in the wild _Canidæ_ may not be as short-lived

as it was in this terrier?

A similar instance is given by Dr. H. D. Schmidt[368] of New Orleans:

"I may cite the example of a young squirrel which I had tamed,

a number of years ago, when serving in the army, and when I had

sufficient leisure and opportunity to study the habits of animals.

In the autumn, before the winter sets in, adult squirrels bury as

many nuts as they can collect, separately, in the ground. Holding

the nut firmly between their teeth, they first scratch a hole in the

ground, and, after pointing their ears in all directions to convince

themselves that no enemy is near, they ram--the head, with the nut

still between the front teeth, serving as a sledge-hammer--the nut

into the ground, and then fill up the hole by means of their paws. The

whole process is executed with great rapidity, and, as it appeared

to me, always with exactly the same movements; in fact, it is done

so well that I could never discover the traces of the burial-ground.

Now, as regards the young squirrel, which, of course, never had been

present at the burial of a nut, I observed that, after having eaten

a number of hickory-nuts to appease its appetite, it would take one

between its teeth, then sit upright and listen in all directions.

Finding all right, it would scratch upon the smooth blanket on which

I was playing with it as if to make a hole, then hammer with the

nut between its teeth upon the blanket, and finally perform all the

motions required to fill up a hole_--in the air_; after which it would

jump away, leaving the nut, of course, uncovered."

The anecdote, of course, illustrates beautifully the close relation

of instinct to reflex action--a particular perception calls forth

particular movements, and that is all. Dr. Schmidt writes me that

the squirrel in question soon passed away from his observation. It

may fairly be presumed that, if he had been long retained prisoner

in a cage, he would soon have forgotten his gesticulations over the

hickory-nuts.

One might, indeed, go still further with safety, and expect that, if

such a captive squirrel were then set free, he would never afterwards

acquire this peculiar instinct of his tribe.[369]

* * * * *

Leaving lower animals aside, and turning to human instincts, we see the

law of transiency corroborated on the widest scale by the alternation

of different interests and passions as human life goes on. With the

child, life is all play and fairy-tales and learning the external

properties of 'things;' with the youth, it is bodily exercises of a

more systematic sort, novels of the real world, boon-fellowship and

song, friendship and love, nature, travel and adventure, science

and philosophy; with the man, ambition and policy, acquisitiveness,

responsibility to others, and the selfish zest of the battle of life.

If a boy grows up alone at the age of games and sports, and learns

neither to play ball, nor row, nor sail, nor ride, nor skate, nor

fish, nor shoot, probably he will be sedentary to the end of his days;

and, though the best of opportunities be afforded him for learning

these things later, it is a hundred to one but he will pass them by

and shrink back from the effort of taking those necessary first steps

the prospect of which, at an earlier age, would have filled him with

eager delight. The sexual passion expires after a protracted reign;

but it is well known that its peculiar manifestations in a given

individual depend almost entirely on the habits he may form during the

early period of its activity. Exposure to bad company then makes him a

loose liver all his days; chastity kept at first makes the same easy

later on. In all pedagogy the great thing is to strike the iron while

hot, and to seize the wave of the pupil's interest in each successive

subject before its ebb has come, so that knowledge may be got and a

habit of skill acquired--a headway of interest, in short, secured,

on which afterward the individual may float. There is a happy moment

for fixing skill in drawing, for making boys collectors in natural

history, and presently dissectors and botanists; then for initiating

them into the harmonies of mechanics and the wonders of physical and

chemical law. Later, introspective psychology and the metaphysical

and religious mysteries take their turn; and, last of all, the drama

of human affairs and worldly wisdom in the widest sense of the term.

In each of us a saturation-point is soon reached in all these things;

the impetus of our purely intellectual zeal expires, and unless the

topic be one associated with some urgent personal need that keens our

wits constantly whetted about it, we settle into an equilibrium, and

live on what we learned when our interest was fresh and instinctive,

without adding to the store. Outside of their own business, the ideas

gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only

ideas they shall have in their lives. They _cannot_ get anything new.

Disinterested curiosity is past, the mental grooves and channels set,

the power of assimilation gone. If by chance we ever do learn anything

about some entirely new topic we are afflicted with a strange sense

of insecurity, and we fear to advance a resolute opinion. But, with

things learned in the plastic days of instinctive curiosity we never

lose entirely our sense of being at home. There remains a kinship, a

sentiment of intimate acquaintance, which, even when we know we have

failed to keep abreast of the subject, flatters us with a sense of

power over it, and makes us feel not altogether out of the pale.

Whatever individual exceptions might be cited to this are of the sort

that 'prove the rule.'

To detect the moment of the instinctive readiness for the subject

is, then, the first duty of every educator. As for the pupils, it

would probably lead to a more earnest temper on the part of college

students if they had less belief in their unlimited future intellectual

potentialities, and could be brought to realize that whatever physics

and political economy and philosophy they are now acquiring are, for

better or worse, the physics and political economy and philosophy that

will have to serve them to the end.

The natural conclusion to draw from this transiency of instincts

is that _most instincts are implanted for the sake of giving rise

to habits, and that, this purpose once accomplished, the instincts

themselves, as such, have no raison d'être in the psychical economy,

and consequently fade away._ That occasionally an instinct should fade

before circumstances permit of a habit being formed, or that, if the

habit be formed, other factors than the pure instinct should modify its

course, need not surprise us. Life is full of the imperfect adjustment

to individual cases, of arrangements which, taking the species as a

whole, are quite orderly and regular. Instinct cannot be expected to

escape this general risk.

SPECIAL HUMAN INSTINCTS.

Let us now test our principles by turning to human instincts in more

detail. We cannot pretend in these pages to be minute or exhaustive.

But we can say enough to set all the above generalities in a more

favorable light. But first, what kind of motor reactions upon objects

shall we count as instincts? This, as aforesaid, is a somewhat

arbitrary matter. Some of the actions aroused in us by objects go no

further than our own bodies. Such is the bristling up of the attention

when a novel object is perceived, or the 'expression' on the face or

the breathing apparatus of an emotion it may excite. These movements

merge into ordinary reflex actions like laughing when tickled, or

making a wry face at a bad taste. Other actions take effect upon the

outer world. Such are flight from a wild beast, imitation of what we

see a comrade do, etc. On the whole it is best to be catholic, since

it is very hard to draw an exact line; and call both of these kinds of

activity instinctive, so far as either may be _naturally_ provoked by

the presence of specific sorts of outward fact.

Professor Preyer, in his careful little work, 'Die Seele des Kindes,'

says "instinctive acts are in man few in number, and, apart from those

connected with the sexual passion, difficult to recognize after early

youth is past." And he adds, "so much the more attention should we

pay to the instinctive movements of new-born babies, sucklings, and

small children." That instinctive acts should be easiest _recognized_

in childhood would be a very natural effect of our principles of

transitoriness, and of the restrictive influence of habits once

acquired; but we shall see how far they are from being 'few in number'

in man. Professor Preyer divides the movements of infants into

_impulsive, reflex,_ and instinctive. By impulsive movements he means

_random_ movements of limbs, body, and voice, with no aim, and before

perception is aroused. Among the first reflex movements are crying on

contact with the air, _sneezing, snuffling, snoring, coughing, sighing,

sobbing, gagging, vomiting, hiccuping, starting, moving the limbs when

tickled, touched, or blown upon,_ etc., etc.

Of the movements called by him instinctive in the child, Professor

Preyer gives a full account. Herr Schneider does the same; and as their

descriptions agree with each other and with what other writers about

infancy say, I will base my own very brief statement on theirs.

_Sucking_: almost perfect at birth; not coupled with any congenital

tendency to _seek_ the breast, this being a later acquisition. As we

have seen, sucking is a transitory instinct.

_Biting_ an object placed in the mouth, _chewing_ and _grinding the

teeth; licking_ sugar; making characteristic _grimaces_ over bitter and

sweet tastes; _spitting_ out.

_Clasping_ an object which touches the fingers or toes. Later, attempts

to _grasp_ at an object seen at a distance. _Pointing at_ such objects,

and making a peculiar _sound expressive of desire_, which, in my own

three children, was the first manifestation of speech, occurring many

weeks before other significant sounds.

_Carrying to the mouth_ of the object, when grasped. This instinct,

guided and inhibited by the sense of taste, and combined with the

instincts of biting, chewing, sucking, spitting-out, etc., and with the

reflex act of swallowing, leads in the individual to a set of habits

which constitute his _function of alimentation_, and which may or may

not be gradually modified as life goes on.

_Crying_ at bodily discomfort, hunger, or pain, and at solitude.

_Smiling_ at being noticed, fondled, or smiled at by others. It seems

very doubtful whether young infants have any instinctive fear of a

terrible or scowling face. I have been unable to make my own children,

under a year old, change their expression when I changed mine; at most

they manifested attention or curiosity. Preyer instances a _protrusion

of the lips_, which, he says, may be so great as to remind one of

that in the chimpanzee, as an instinctive expression of concentrated

attention in the human infant.

_Turning the head aside_ as a gesture of rejection, a gesture usually

accompanied with a frown and a bending back of the body, and with

holding the breath.

_Holding head erect._

_Sitting up._

_Standing_.

_Locomotion_. The early movements of children's limbs are more or

less symmetrical. Later a baby will move his legs in alternation if

suspended in the air. But until the impulse to walk awakens by the

natural ripening of the nerve-centres, it seems to make no difference

how often the child's feet may be placed in contact with the ground;

the legs remain limp, and do not respond to the sensation of contact

in the soles by muscular contractions _pressing downwards_. No sooner,

however, is the standing impulse born, than the child stiffens his legs

and presses downward as soon as he feels the floor. In some babies

this is the first locomotory reaction. In others it is preceded by

the instinct to _creep_, which arises, as I can testify, often in a

very sudden way. Yesterday the baby sat quite contentedly wherever he

was put; to-day it has become impossible to keep him sitting at all,

so irresistible is the impulse, aroused by the sight of the floor, to

throw himself forward upon his hands. Usually the arms are too weak,

and the ambitious little experimenter falls on his nose. But his

perseverance is dauntless, and he ends in a few days by learning to

travel rapidly around the room in the quadrupedal way. The position

of the legs in 'creeping' varies much from one child to another. My

own child, when creeping, was often observed to pick up objects from

the floor with his mouth, a phenomenon which, as Dr. O. W. Holmes has

remarked, like the early tendency to grasp with the toes, easily lends

itself to interpretation as a reminiscence of prehuman ancestral habits.

The walking instinct may awaken with no less suddenness, and its entire

education be completed within a week's compass, barring, of course, a

little 'grogginess' in the gait. Individual infants vary enormously;

but on the whole it is safe to say that the mode of development of

these locomotor instincts is inconsistent with the account given by

the older English associationist school, of their being results of

the individual's education, due altogether to the gradual association

of certain perceptions with certain haphazard movements and certain

resultant pleasures. Mr. Bain has tried,[370] by describing the

demeanor of new-born lambs, to show that locomotion is _learned_ by a

very rapid experience. But the observation recorded proves the faculty

to be almost perfect from the first; and all others who have observed

new-born calves, lambs, and pigs agree that in these animals the

powers of standing and walking, and of interpreting the topographical

significance of sights and sounds, are all but fully developed at

birth. Often in animals who seem to be 'learning' to walk or fly the

semblance is illusive. The awkwardness shown is not due to the fact

that 'experience' has not yet been there to associate the successful

movements and exclude the failures, but to the fact that the animal

is beginning his attempts before the co-ordinating centres have quite

ripened for their work. Mr. Spalding's observations on this point are

conclusive as to birds.

"Birds," he says, "do not _learn_ to fly. Two years ago I shut up five

unfledged swallows in a small box, not much larger than the nest from

which they were taken. The little box, which had a wire front, was

hung on the wall near the nest, and the young swallows were fed by

their parents through the wires. In this confinement, where they could

not even extend their wings, they were kept until after they were

fully fledged.... On going to set the prisoners free, one was found

dead.... The remaining four were allowed to escape one at a time. Two

of these were perceptibly wavering and unsteady in their flight. One

of them, after a flight of some ninety yards, disappeared among some

trees." No. 3 and No. 4 "never flew against anything, nor was there,

in their avoiding objects, any appreciable difference between them and

the old birds. No. 3 swept round the Wellingtonia, and No. 4 rose over

the hedge, just as we see the old swallows doing every hour of the

day. I have this summer verified these observations. Of two swallows

I had similarly confined, one, on being set free, flew a yard or two

close to the ground, rose in the direction of a beech-tree, which

it gracefully avoided; it was seen for a considerable time sweeping

round the beeches and performing magnificent evolutions in the air

high above them. The other, which was observed to beat the air with

its wings more than usual, was soon lost to sight, behind some trees.

Titmice, tomtits, and wrens I have made the subjects of similar

observations, and with similar results."[371]

In the light of this report, one may well be tempted to make a

prediction about the human child, and say that if a baby were kept

from getting on his feet for two or three weeks after the first impulse

to walk had shown itself in him,--a small blister on each sole would do

the business,--he might then be expected to walk about as well, through

the mere ripening of his nerve-centres, as if the ordinary process of

'learning' had been allowed to occur during all the blistered time.

It is to be hoped that some scientific widower, left alone with his

offspring at the critical moment, may ere long test this suggestion on

the living subject. _Climbing_ on trees, fences, furniture, banisters,

etc., is a well-marked instinctive propensity which ripens after the

fourth year.

_Vocalization._ This may be either musical or significant. Very few

weeks after birth the baby begins to express its spirits by emitting

vowel sounds, as much during inspiration as during expiration, and

will lie on its back cooing and gurgling to itself for nearly an

hour. But this singing has nothing to do with speech. Speech is sound

_significant_. During the second year a certain number of significant

sounds are gradually acquired; but talking proper does not set in till

the instinct to _imitate sounds_ ripens in the nervous system; and

this ripening seems in some children to be quite abrupt. Then speech

grows rapidly in extent and perfection. The child imitates every word

he hears uttered, and repeats it again and again with the most evident

pleasure at his new power. At this time it is quite impossible to

talk _with_ him, for his condition is that of 'Echolalia,'--instead

of answering the question, he simply reiterates it. The result is,

however, that his vocabulary increases very fast; and little by little,

with teaching from above, the young prattler understands, puts words

together to express his own wants and perceptions, and even makes

intelligent replies. From a speechless, he has become a speaking,

animal. The interesting point with regard to this instinct is the

oftentimes very sudden birth of the impulse to imitate sounds. Up to

the date of its awakening the child may have been as devoid of it as

a dog. Four days later his whole energy may be poured into this new

channel. The habits of articulation formed during the plastic age of

childhood are in most persons sufficient to inhibit the formation of

new ones of a fundamentally different sort--witness the inevitable

'foreign accent' which distinguishes the speech of those who learn a

language after early youth.

_Imitation._ The child's first words are in part vocables of his own

invention, which his parents adopt, and which, as far as they go,

form a new human tongue upon the earth; and in part they are his more

or less successful imitations of words he hears the parents use. But

the instinct of _imitating gestures_ develops earlier than that of

imitating sounds,--unless the sympathetic crying of a baby when it

hears another cry may be reckoned as imitation of a sound. Professor

Preyer speaks of his child imitating the protrusion of the father's

lips in its fifteenth week. The various accomplishments of infancy,

making 'pat-a-cake,' saying 'bye-bye,' 'blowing out the candle,' etc.,

usually fall well inside the limits of the first year. Later come

all the various imitative games in which childhood revels, playing

'horse,' 'soldiers,' etc., etc. And from this time onward man is

essentially _the_ imitative animal. His whole educability and in fact

the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his

strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.

'_Humani nihil a me alienum puto_,' is the motto of each individual of

the species; and makes him, whenever another individual shows a power

or superiority of any kind, restless until he can exhibit it himself.

But apart from this kind of imitation, of which the psychological

roots are complex, there is the more direct propensity to speak and

walk and behave like others, usually without any conscious intention

of so doing. And there is the imitative tendency which shows itself in

large masses of men, and produces panics, and orgies, and frenzies of

violence, and which only the rarest individuals can actively withstand.

This sort of imitativeness is possessed by man in common with other

gregarious animals, and is an instinct in the fullest sense of the

term, being a blind impulse to act as soon as a certain perception

occurs. It is particularly hard not to imitate gaping, laughing, or

looking and running in a certain direction, if we see others doing so.

Certain mesmerized subjects must automatically imitate whatever motion

their operator makes before their eyes.[372] A successful piece of

mimicry gives to both bystanders and mimic a peculiar kind of æsthetic

pleasure. The dramatic impulse, the tendency to pretend one is someone

else, contains this pleasure of mimicry as one of its elements. Another

element seems to be a peculiar sense of power in stretching one's

own personality so as to include that of a strange person. In young

children this instinct often knows no bounds. For a few months in one

of my children's third year, he literally hardly ever appeared in his

own person. It was always, "Play I am So-and-so, and you are So-and-so,

and the chair is such a thing, and then we'll do this or that." If you

called him by his name, H., you invariably got the reply, "I'm not H.,

I'm a hyena, or a horse-car," or whatever the feigned object might be.

He outwore this impulse after a time; but while it lasted, it had every

appearance of being the automatic result of ideas, often suggested by

perceptions, working out irresistible motor effects. Imitation shades

into

_Emulation or Rivalry,_ a very intense instinct, especially rife with

young children, or at least especially undisguised. Everyone knows it.

Nine-tenths of the work of the world is done by it. We know that if we

do not do the task someone else will do it and get the credit, so we do

it. It has very little connection with sympathy, but rather more with

pugnacity, which we proceed in turn to consider.

_Pugnacity; anger; resentment._ In many respects man is the most

ruthlessly ferocious of beasts. As with all gregarious animals,

'two souls,' as Faust says, 'dwell within his breast,' the one of

sociability and helpfulness, the other of jealousy and antagonism to

his mates. Though in a general way he cannot live without them, yet,

as regards certain individuals, it often falls out that he cannot

live with them either. Constrained to be a member of a tribe, he

still has a right to decide, as far as in him lies, of which other

members the tribe shall consist. Killing off a few obnoxious ones

may often better the chances of those that remain. And killing off a

neighboring tribe from whom no good thing comes, but only competition,

may materially better the lot of the whole tribe. Hence the gory

cradle, the _bellum omnium contra omnes_, in which our race was reared;

hence the fickleness of human ties, the ease with which the foe of

yesterday becomes the ally of to-day, the friend of to-day the enemy

of to-morrow; hence the fact that we, the lineal representatives of

the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must,

whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about

with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smouldering and

sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so

many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.

_Sympathy_ is an emotion as to whose instinctiveness psychologists

have held hot debate, some of them contending that it is no primitive

endowment, but, originally at least, the result of a rapid calculation

of the good consequences to ourselves of the sympathetic act. Such a

calculation, at first conscious, would grow more unconscious as it

became more habitual, and at last, tradition and association aiding,

might prompt to actions which could not be distinguished from immediate

impulses. It is hardly needful to argue against the falsity of this

view. Some forms of sympathy, that of mother with child, for example,

are surely primitive, and not intelligent forecasts of board and

lodging and other support to be reaped in old age. Danger to the child

blindly and instantaneously stimulates the mother to actions of alarm

or defence. Menace or harm to the adult beloved or friend excites us in

a corresponding way, often against all the dictates of prudence. It is

true that sympathy does not necessarily follow from the mere fact of

gregariousness. Cattle do not help a wounded comrade; on the contrary,

they are more likely to dispatch him. But a dog will lick another sick

dog, and even bring him food; and the sympathy of monkeys is proved

by many observations to be strong. In man, then, we may lay it down

that the sight of suffering or danger to others is a direct exciter of

interest, and an immediate stimulus, if no complication hinders, to

acts of relief. There is nothing unaccountable or pathological about

this--nothing to justify Professor Bain's assimilation of it to the

'fixed ideas' of insanity, as 'clashing with the regular outgoings of

the will.' It may be as primitive as any other 'outgoing,' and may be

due to a random variation selected, quite as probably as gregariousness

and maternal love are, even in Spencer's opinion, due to such

variations.

It is true that sympathy is peculiarly liable to inhibition from other

instincts which its stimulus may call forth. The traveller whom the

good Samaritan rescued may well have prompted such instinctive fear

or disgust in the priest and Levite who passed him by, that their

sympathy could not come to the front. Then, of course, habits, reasoned

reflections, and calculations may either check or reinforce one's

sympathy; as may also the instincts of love or hate, if these exist,

for the suffering individual. The hunting and pugnacious instincts,

when aroused, also inhibit our sympathy absolutely. This accounts for

the cruelty of collections of men hounding each other on to bait or

torture a victim. The blood mounts to the eyes, and sympathy's chance

is gone.[373]

_The hunting instinct_ has an equally remote origin in the evolution

of the race.[374] The hunting and the fighting instinct combine in

many manifestations. They both support the emotion of anger; they

combine in the fascination which stories of atrocity have for most

minds; and the utterly blind excitement of giving the rein to our fury

when our blood is up (an excitement whose intensity is greater than

that of any other human passion save one) is only explicable as an

impulse aboriginal in character, and having more to do with immediate

and overwhelming tendencies to muscular discharge than to any possible

reminiscences of effects of experience, or association of ideas. I

say this here, because the pleasure of disinterested cruelty has

been thought a paradox, and writers have sought to show that it is

no primitive attribute of our nature, but rather a resultant of the

subtile combination of other less malignant elements of mind. This is

a hopeless task. If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true

at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals _must_ have been

among the most important of man's primitive functions, the fighting and

the chasing instincts _must_ have become ingrained. Certain perceptions

_must_ immediately, and without the intervention of inferences and

ideas, have prompted emotions and motor discharges; and both the

latter must, from the nature of the case, have been very violent, and

therefore, when unchecked, of an intensely pleasurable kind. It is just

because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it

is so hard to eradicate, especially where a fight or a hunt is promised

as part of the fun.[375]

As Rochefoucauld says, there is something in the misfortunes of our

very friends that does not altogether displease us; and an apostle of

peace will feel a certain vicious thrill run through him, and enjoy

a vicarious brutality, as he turns to the column in his newspaper at

the top of which 'Shocking Atrocity' stands printed in large capitals.

See how the crowd flocks round a street-brawl! Consider the enormous

annual sale of revolvers to persons, not one in a thousand of whom

has any serious intention of using them, but of whom each one has his

carnivorous self-consciousness agreeably tickled by the notion, as he

clutches the handle of his weapon, that he will be rather a dangerous

customer to meet. See the ignoble crew that escorts every great

pugilist--parasites who feel as if the glory of his brutality rubbed

off upon them, and whose darling hope, from day to day, is to arrange

some set-to of which they may share the rapture without enduring the

pains! The first blows at a prize-fight are apt to make a refined

spectator sick; but his blood is soon up in favor of one party, and it

will then seem as if the other fellow could not be banged and pounded

and mangled enough--the refined spectator would like to reinforce the

blows himself. Over the sinister orgies of blood of certain depraved

and insane persons let a curtain be drawn, as well as over the ferocity

with which otherwise fairly decent men may be animated, when (at the

sacking of a town, for instance), the excitement of victory long

delayed, the sudden freedom of rapine and of lust, the contagion of

a crowd, and the impulse to imitate and outdo, all combine to swell

the blind drunkenness of the killing-instinct, and carry it to its

extreme. No! those who try to account for this from above downwards,

as if it resulted from the consequences of the victory being rapidly

inferred, and from the agreeable sentiments associated with them in the

imagination, have missed the root of the matter. Our ferocity is blind,

and can only be explained from _below_. Could we trace it back through

our line of descent, we should see it taking more and more the form of

a fatal reflex response, and at the same time becoming more and more

the pure and direct emotion that it is.[376]

In childhood it takes this form. The boys who pull out grasshoppers'

legs and butterflies' wings, and disembowel every frog they catch,

have no _thought_ at all about the matter. The creatures tempt their

hands to a fascinating occupation, to which they have to yield. It

is with them as with the 'boy-fiend' Jesse Pomeroy, who cut a little

girl's throat, 'just to see how she'd act.' The normal provocatives

of the impulse are all living beasts, great and small, toward which

a contrary habit has not been formed--all human beings in whom we

perceive a certain _intent_ towards _us_, and a large number of human

beings who offend us peremptorily, either by their look, or gait, or

by some circumstance in their lives which we dislike. Inhibited by

sympathy, and by reflection calling up impulses of an opposite kind,

civilized men lose the habit of acting out their pugnacious instincts

in a perfectly natural way, and a passing feeling of anger, with its

comparatively faint bodily expressions, may be the limit of their

physical combativeness. Such a feeling as this may, however, be aroused

by a wide range of objects. Inanimate things, combinations of color

and sound, bad bills of fare, may in persons who combine fastidious

taste with an irascible temperament produce real ebullitions of rage.

Though the female sex is often said to have less pugnacity than the

male, the difference seems connected more with the extent of the motor

consequences of the impulse than with its frequency. Women take offence

and get angry, if anything, more easily than men, but their anger is

inhibited by fear and other principles of their nature from expressing

itself in blows. The hunting-instinct proper seems to be decidedly

weaker in them than in men. The latter instinct is easily restricted by

habit to certain objects, which become legitimate 'game,' while other

things are spared. If the hunting-instinct be not exercised at all, it

may even entirely die out, and a man may enjoy letting a wild creature

live, even though he might easily kill it. Such a type is now becoming

frequent; but there is no doubt that in the eyes of a child of nature

such a personage would seem a sort of moral monster.

_Fear_ is a reaction aroused by the same objects that arouse ferocity.

The antagonism of the two is an interesting study in instinctive

dynamics. We both fear, and wish to kill, anything that may kill

us; and the question which of the two impulses we shall follow is

usually decided by some one of those _collateral circumstances_ of the

particular case, to be moved by which is the mark of superior mental

natures. Of course this introduces uncertainty into the reaction; but

it is an uncertainty found in the higher brutes as well as in men, and

ought not to be taken as proof that we are less instinctive than they.

Fear has bodily expressions of an extremely energetic kind, and stands,

beside lust and anger, as one of the three most exciting emotions of

which our nature is susceptible. The progress from brute to man is

characterized by nothing so much as by the decrease in frequency of

proper occasions for fear. In civilized life, in particular, it has

at last become possible for large numbers of people to pass from the

cradle to the grave without ever having had a pang of genuine fear.

Many of us need an attack of mental disease to teach us the meaning

of the word. Hence the possibility of so much blindly optimistic

philosophy and religion. The atrocities of life become 'like a tale of

little meaning though the words are strong;' we doubt if anything like

_us_ ever really was within the tiger's jaws, and conclude that the

horrors we hear of are but a sort of painted tapestry for the chambers

in which we lie so comfortably at peace with ourselves and with the

world.

Be this as it may, fear is a genuine instinct, and one of the earliest

shown by the human child. _Noises_ seem especially to call it forth.

Most noises from the outer world, to a child bred in the house, have

no exact significance. They are simply startling. To quote a good

observer, M. Perez:

"Children between three and ten months are less often alarmed by

visual than by auditory impressions. In cats, from the fifteenth

day, the contrary is the case. A child, three and a half months old,

in the midst of the turmoil of a conflagration, in presence of the

devouring flames and ruined walls, showed neither astonishment nor

fear, but smiled at the woman who was taking care of him, while his

parents were busy. The noise, however, of the trumpet of the firemen,

who were approaching, and that of the wheels of the engine, made him

start and cry. At this age I have never yet seen an infant startled

at a flash of lightning, even when intense; but I have seen many of

them alarmed at the voice of the thunder.... Thus fear comes rather

by the ears than by the eyes, to the child without experience. It is

natural that this should be reversed, or reduced, in animals

organized to perceive danger afar. Accordingly, although I have never

seen a child frightened at his first sight of fire, I have many a

time seen young dogs, young cats, young chickens, and young birds

frightened thereby.... I picked up some years ago a lost cat about a

year old. Some months afterward at the onset of cold weather I lit the

fire in the grate of my study, which was her reception-room. She first

looked at the flame in a very frightened way. I brought her near to

it. She leaped away and ran to hide under the bed. Although the fire

was lighted every day, it was not until the end of the winter that I

could prevail upon her to stay upon a chair near it. The next winter,

however, all apprehension had disappeared.... Let us, then, conclude

that there are hereditary dispositions to fear, which are independent

of experience, but which experiences may end by attenuating very

considerably. In the human infant I believe them to be particularly

connected with the ear."[377]

The effect of noise in heightening any terror we may feel in adult

years is very marked. The _howling_ of the storm, whether on sea or

land, is a principal cause of our anxiety when exposed to it. The

writer has been interested in noticing in his own person, while lying

in bed, and kept awake by the wind outside, how invariably each loud

gust of it arrested momentarily his heart. A dog, attacking us, is much

more dreadful by reason of the noises he makes.

_Strange men_, and _strange animals_, either large or small,

excite fear, but especially men or animals advancing toward us in

a threatening way. This is entirely instinctive and antecedent to

experience. Some children will cry with terror at their very first

sight of a cat or dog, and it will often be impossible for weeks to

make them touch it. Others will wish to fondle it almost immediately.

Certain kinds of 'vermin,' especially spiders and snakes, seem to

excite a fear unusually difficult to overcome. It is impossible to say

how much of this difference is instinctive and how much the result

of stories heard about these creatures. That the fear of 'vermin'

ripens gradually, seemed to me to be proved in a child of my own to

whom I gave a live frog once, at the age of six to eight months, and

again when he was a year and a half old. The first time he seized it

promptly, and holding it, in spite of its struggling, at last got its

head into his mouth. He then let it crawl up his breast, and get upon

his face, without showing alarm. But the second time, although he had

seen no frog and heard no story about a frog between whiles, it was

almost impossible to induce him to touch it. Another child, a year old,

eagerly took some very large spiders into his hand. At present he is

afraid, but has been exposed meanwhile to the teachings of the nursery.

One of my children from her birth upwards saw daily the pet pug-dog of

the house, and never betrayed the slightest fear until she was (if I

recollect rightly) about eight months old. Then the instinct suddenly

seemed to develop, and with such intensity that familiarity had no

mitigating effect. She screamed whenever the dog entered the room, and

for many months remained afraid to touch him. It is needless to say

that no change in the pug's unfailingly friendly conduct had anything

to do with this change of feeling in the child.

Preyer tells of a young child screaming with fear on being carried

near to the _sea_. The great source of terror to infancy is solitude.

The teleology of this is obvious, as is also that of the infant's

expression of dismay--the never-failing cry--on waking up and finding

himself alone.

_Black things_, and especially _dark places_, holes, caverns, etc.,

arouse a peculiarly gruesome fear. This fear, as well as that of

solitude, of being 'lost,' are explained after a fashion by ancestral

experience. Says Schneider:

"It is a fact that men, especially in childhood, fear to go into a

dark cavern or a gloomy wood. This feeling of fear arises, to be sure,

partly from the fact that we easily suspect that dangerous beasts may

lurk in these localities--a suspicion due to stories we have heard and

read. But, on the other hand, it is quite sure that this fear at a

certain perception is also directly inherited. Children who have been

carefully guarded from all ghost-stories are nevertheless terrified

and cry if led into a dark place, especially if sounds are made there.

Even an adult can easily observe that an uncomfortable timidity steals

over him in a lonely wood at night, although he may have the fixed

conviction that not the slightest danger is near.

"This feeling of fear occurs in many men even in their own house after

dark, although it is much stronger in a dark cavern or forest. The

fact of such instinctive fear is easily explicable when we consider

that our savage ancestors through innumerable generations were

accustomed to meet with dangerous beasts in caverns, especially bears,

and were for the most part attacked by such beasts during the night

and in the woods, and that thus an inseparable association between the

perceptions of darkness of caverns and woods, and fear took place, and

was inherited."[378]

_High places_ cause fear of a peculiarly sickening sort, though here,

again, individuals differ enormously. The utterly blind instinctive

character of the motor impulses here is shown by the fact that they

are almost always entirely unreasonable, but that reason is powerless

to suppress them. That they are a mere incidental peculiarity of the

nervous system, like liability to sea-sickness, or love of music, with

no teleological significance, seems more than probable. The fear in

question varies so much from one person to another, and its detrimental

effects are so much more obvious than its uses, that it is hard to

see how it could be a selected instinct. Man is anatomically one of

the best fitted of animals for climbing about high places. The best

psychical complement to this equipment would seem to be a 'level head'

when there, not a dread of going there at all. In fact, the teleology

of fear, beyond a certain point, is very dubious. Professor Mosso, in

his interesting monograph, 'La Paura' (which has been translated into

French), concludes that many of its manifestations must be considered

pathological rather than useful; Bain, in several places, expresses the

same opinion; and this, I think, is surely the view which any observer

without _a priori_ prejudices must take. A certain amount of timidity

obviously adapts us to the world we live in, but the _fear-paroxysm_ is

surely altogether harmful to him who is its prey.

Fear of the supernatural is one variety of fear. It is difficult to

assign any normal object for this fear, unless it were a genuine

ghost. But, in spite of psychical research-societies, science has

not yet adopted ghosts; so we can only say that certain _ideas_ of

supernatural agency, associated with real circumstances, produce a

peculiar kind of horror. This horror is probably explicable as the

result of a combination of simpler horrors. To bring the ghostly terror

to its maximum, many usual elements of the dreadful must combine,

such as loneliness, darkness, inexplicable sounds, especially of a

dismal character, moving figures half discerned (or, if discerned, of

dreadful aspect), and a vertiginous baffling of the expectation. This

last element, which is _intellectual_, is very important. It produces

a strange emotional 'curdle' in our blood to see a process with which

we are familiar deliberately taking an unwonted course. Any one's heart

would stop beating if he perceived his chair sliding unassisted across

the floor. The lower animals appear to be sensitive to the mysteriously

exceptional as well as ourselves. My friend Professor W. K. Brooks, of

the Johns Hopkins University, told me of his large and noble dog being

frightened into a sort of epileptic fit by a bone being drawn across

the floor by a thread which the dog did not see. Darwin and Romanes

have given similar experiences.[379] The idea of the supernatural

involves that the usual should be set at naught. In the witch and

hobgoblin supernatural, other elements still of fear are brought

in--caverns, slime and ooze, vermin, corpses, and the like.[380] A

human corpse seems normally to produce an instinctive dread, which is

no doubt somewhat due to its mysteriousness, and which familiarity

rapidly dispels. But, in view of the fact that cadaveric, reptilian,

and underground horrors play so specific and constant a part in many

nightmares and forms of delirium, it seems not altogether unwise to ask

whether these forms of dreadful circumstance may not at a former period

have been more normal objects of the environment than now. The ordinary

cock-sure evolutionist ought to have no difficulty in explaining these

terrors, and the scenery that provokes them, as relapses into the

consciousness of the cave-men, a consciousness usually overlaid in us

by experiences of more recent date.

There are certain other pathological fears, and certain peculiarities

in the expression of ordinary fear, which might receive an explanatory

light from ancestral conditions, even infra-human ones. In ordinary

fear, one may either run, or remain semi-paralyzed. The latter

condition reminds us of the so-called death-shamming instinct shown by

many animals. Dr. Lindsay, in his work 'Mind in Animals,' says this

must require great self-command in those that practise it. But it is

really no feigning of death at all, and requires no self-command. It

is simply a terror-paralysis which has been so useful as to become

hereditary. The beast of prey does not think the motionless bird,

insect, or crustacean dead. He simply fails to notice them at all;

because his senses, like ours, are much more strongly excited by a

moving object than by a still one. It is the same instinct which leads

a boy playing 'I spy' to hold his very breath when the seeker is near,

and which makes the beast of prey himself in many cases motionlessly

lie in wait for his victim or silently 'stalk' it, by rapid approaches

alternated with periods of immobility. It is the opposite of the

instinct which makes us jump up and down and move our arms when we

wish to attract the notice of some one passing far away, and makes the

shipwrecked sailor frantically wave a cloth upon the raft where he is

floating when a distant sail appears. Now, may not the statue-like,

crouching immobility of some melancholiacs, insane with general

anxiety and fear of everything, be in some way connected with this

old instinct? They can give no _reason_ for their fear to move; but

immobility makes them feel safer and more comfortable. Is not this the

mental state of the 'feigning' animal?

Again, take the strange symptom which has been described of late years

by the rather absurd name of _agoraphobia_. The patient is seized with

palpitation and terror at the sight of any open place or broad street

which he has to cross alone. He trembles, his knees bend, he may even

faint at the idea. Where he has sufficient self-command he sometimes

accomplishes the object by keeping safe under the lee of a vehicle

going across, or joining himself to a knot of other people. But usually

he slinks round the sides of the square, hugging the houses as closely

as he can. This emotion has no utility in a civilized man, but when

we notice the chronic agoraphobia of our domestic cats, and see the

tenacious way in which many wild animals, especially rodents, cling

to cover, and only venture on a dash across the open as a desperate

measure--even then making for every stone or bunch of weeds which may

give a momentary shelter--when we see this we are strongly tempted to

ask whether such an odd kind of fear in us be not due to the accidental

resurrection, through disease, of a sort of instinct which may in some

of our ancestors have had a permanent and on the whole a useful part to

play?

_Appropriation_ or _Acquisitiveness_. The beginnings of acquisitiveness

are seen in the impulse which very young children display, to snatch

at, or beg for, any object which pleases their attention. Later,

when they begin to speak, among the first words they emphasize

are 'me' and 'mine.'[381] Their earliest quarrels with each other

are about questions of ownership; and parents of twins soon learn

that it conduces to a quiet house to buy all presents in impartial

duplicate. Of the later evolution of the proprietary instinct I need

not speak. Everyone knows how difficult a thing it is not to covet

whatever pleasing thing we see, and how the sweetness of the thing

often is as gall to us so long as it is another's. When another is in

possession, the impulse to appropriate the thing often turns into the

impulse to harm him--what is called _envy_, or _jealousy_, ensues. In

civilized life the impulse to own is usually checked by a variety of

considerations, and only passes over into action under circumstances

legitimated by habit and common consent, an additional example of the

way in which one instinctive tendency may be inhibited by others. A

variety of the proprietary instinct is the impulse to form collections

of the same sort of thing. It differs much in individuals, and shows

in a striking way how instinct and habit interact. For, although a

collection of any given thing--like postage-stamps--need not be begun

by any given person, yet the chances are that if accidentally it _be_

begun by a person with the collecting instinct, it will probably be

continued. The chief interest of the objects, in the collector's eyes,

is that they are a collection, and that they are his. Rivalry, to be

sure, inflames this, as it does every other passion, yet the objects of

a collector's mania need not be necessarily such as are generally in

demand. Boys will collect anything that they see another boy collect,

from pieces of chalk and peach-pits up to books and photographs. Out

of a hundred students whom I questioned, only four or five had never

collected anything.[382]

The associationist psychology denies that there is any blind primitive

instinct to appropriate, and would explain all acquisitiveness, in

the first instance, as a desire to secure the 'pleasures' which the

objects possessed may yield; and, secondly, as the association of the

idea of pleasantness with the _holding_ of the thing, even though the

pleasure originally got by it was only gained through its expense or

destruction. Thus the miser is shown to us as one who has transferred

to the gold by which he may buy the goods of this life all the emotions

which the goods themselves would yield; and who thereafter loves the

gold for its own sake, preferring the means of pleasure to the pleasure

itself. There can be little doubt that much of this analysis a broader

view of the facts would have dispelled. 'The miser' is an abstraction.

There are all kinds of misers. The common sort, the excessively

niggardly man, simply exhibits the psychological law that the potential

has often a far greater influence over our mind than the actual. A man

will not marry now, because to do so puts an end to his indefinite

potentialities of choice of a partner. He prefers the latter. He will

not use open fires or wear his good clothes, because the day may come

when he will have to use the furnace or dress in a worn-out coat, 'and

then where will he be?' For him, better the actual evil than the fear

of it; and so it is with the common lot of misers. Better to live poor

now, with the _power_ of living rich, than to live rich at the risk of

losing the power. These men value their gold, not for its own sake, but

for its powers. Demonetize it, and see how quickly they will get rid of

it! The associationist theory is, as regards them, entirely at fault:

they care nothing for the gold _in se_.

With other misers there combines itself with this preference of the

power over the act the far more instinctive element of the simple

collecting propensity. Every one collects money, and when a man of

petty ways is smitten with the collecting mania for this object he

necessarily becomes a miser. Here again the associationist psychology

is wholly at fault. The hoarding instinct prevails widely among animals

as well as among men. Professor Silliman has thus described one of

the hoards of the California wood-rat, made in an empty stove of an

unoccupied house:

"I found the outside to be composed entirely of spikes, all laid with

symmetry, so as to present the points of the nails outward. In the

centre of this mass was the nest, composed of finely-divided fibres of

hemp-packing. Interlaced with the spikes were the following: about two

dozen knives, forks, and spoons; all the butcher's knives, three in

number; a large carving-knife, fork, and steel; several large plugs of

tobacco,... an old purse containing some silver, matches, and tobacco;

nearly all the small tools from the tool-closets, with several large

augers,... all of which must have been transported some distance, as

they were originally stored in different parts of the house.... The

outside casing of a silver watch was disposed of in one part of the

pile, the glass of the same watch in another, and the works in still

another."[383]

In every lunatic asylum we find the collecting instinct developing

itself in an equally absurd way. Certain patients will spend all their

time picking pins from the floor and hoarding them. Others collect bits

of thread, buttons, or rags, and prize them exceedingly. Now, 'the

Miser' _par excellence_ of the popular imagination and of melodrama,

the monster of squalor and misanthropy, is simply one of these mentally

deranged persons. His intellect may in many matters be clear, but

his instincts, especially that of ownership, are insane, and their

insanity has no more to do with the association of ideas than with the

precession of the equinoxes. As a matter of fact his hoarding usually

is directed to money; but it also includes almost anything besides.

Lately in a Massachusetts town there died a miser who principally

hoarded newspapers. These had ended by so filling all the rooms of

his good-sized house from floor to ceiling that his living-space was

restricted to a few narrow channels between them. Even as I write,

the morning paper gives an account of the emptying of a miser's den

in Boston by the City Board of Health. What the owner hoarded is thus

described:

"He gathered old newspapers, wrapping-paper, incapacitated umbrellas,

canes, pieces of common wire, cast-off clothing, empty barrels, pieces

of iron, old bones, battered tin-ware, fractured pots, and bushels of

such miscellany as is to be found only at the city 'dump.' The empty

barrels were filled, shelves were filled, every hole and corner was

filled, and in order to make more storage-room, 'the hermit' covered

his store-room with a network of ropes, and hung the ropes as full

as they could hold of his curious collections. There was nothing one

could think of that wasn't in that room. As a wood-sawyer, the old

man had never thrown away a saw-blade or a wood-buck. The bucks were

rheumatic and couldn't stand up, and the saw-blades were worn down to

almost nothing in the middle. Some had been actually worn in two, but

the ends were carefully saved and stored away. As a coal-heaver, the

old man had never cast off a worn-out basket, and there were dozens of

the remains of the old things, patched up with canvas and rope-yarns,

in the store-room. There were at least two dozen old hats, fur, cloth,

silk, and straw," etc.

Of course there may be a great many 'associations of ideas' in the

miser's mind about the things he hoards. He is a thinking being, and

must associate things; but, without an entirely blind impulse in this

direction behind all his ideas, such practical results could never be

reached.[384]

_Kleptomania_, as it is called, is an uncontrollable impulse to

appropriate, occurring in persons whose 'associations of ideas' would

naturally all be of a counteracting sort. Kleptomaniacs often promptly

restore, or permit to be restored, what they have taken; so the

impulse need not be to keep, but only to take. But elsewhere hoarding

complicates the result. A gentleman, with whose case I am acquainted,

was discovered, after his death, to have a hoard in his barn of all

sorts of articles, mainly of a trumpery sort, but including pieces of

silver which he had stolen from his own dining-room, and utensils which

he had stolen from his own kitchen, and for which he had afterward

bought substitutes with his own money.

_Constructiveness_ is as genuine and irresistible an instinct in

man as in the bee or the beaver. Whatever things are plastic to his

hands, those things he must remodel into shapes of his own, and the

result of the remodelling, however useless it may be, gives him more

pleasure than the original thing. The mania of young children for

breaking and pulling apart whatever is given them is more often the

expression of a rudimentary constructive impulse than of a destructive

one. 'Blocks' are the playthings of which they are least apt to tire.

Clothes, weapons, tools, habitations, and works of art are the result

of the discoveries to which the plastic instinct leads, each individual

starting where his forerunners left off, and tradition preserving all

that once is gained. Clothing, where not necessitated by cold, is

nothing but a sort of attempt to remodel the human body itself--an

attempt still better shown in the various tattooings, tooth-filings,

scarrings, and other mutilations that are practised by savage tribes.

As for habitation, there can be no doubt that the instinct to seek a

sheltered nook, open only on one side, into which he may retire and be

safe, is in man quite as specific as the instinct of birds to build a

nest. It is not necessarily in the shape of a shelter from wet and cold

that the need comes before him, but he feels less _exposed_ and more

at home when not altogether uninclosed than when lying all abroad. Of

course the utilitarian origin of this instinct is obvious. But to stick

to bare facts at present and not to trace origins, we must admit that

this instinct now exists, and probably always has existed, since man

was man. Habits of the most complicated kind are reared upon it. But

even in the midst of these habits we see the blind instinct cropping

out; as, for example, in the fact that we feign a shelter within a

shelter, by backing up beds in rooms with their heads against the

wall, and never lying in them the other way--just as dogs prefer to

get under or upon some piece of furniture to sleep, instead of lying

in the middle of the room. The first habitations were caves and leafy

grottoes, bettered by the hands; and we see children to-day, when

playing in wild places, take the greatest delight in discovering and

appropriating such retreats and 'playing house' there.

* * * * *

_Play._ The impulse to play in special ways is certainly instinctive.

A boy can no more help running after another boy who runs provokingly

near him, than a kitten can help running after a rolling ball. A child

trying to get into its own hand some object which it sees another child

pick up, and the latter trying to get away with the prize, are just as

much slaves of an automatic prompting as are two chickens or fishes, of

which one has taken a big morsel into its mouth and decamps with it,

while the other darts after in pursuit. All simple active games are

attempts to gain the excitement yielded by certain primitive instincts,

through feigning that the occasions for their exercise are there. They

involve imitation, hunting, fighting, rivalry, acquisitiveness, and

construction, combined in various ways; their special rules are habits,

discovered by accident, selected by intelligence, and propagated by

tradition; but unless they were founded in automatic impulses, games

would lose most of their zest. The sexes differ somewhat in their

play-impulses. As Schneider says:

"The little boy imitates soldiers, models clay into an oven, builds

houses, makes a wagon out of chairs, rides on horseback upon a stick,

drives nails with the hammer, harnesses his brethren and comrades

together and plays the stage-driver, or lets himself be captured as a

wild horse by some one else. The girl, on the contrary, plays with her

doll, washes and dresses it, strokes it, clasps and kisses it, puts

it to bed and tucks it in, sings it a cradle-song, or speaks with it

as if it were a living being.... This fact that a sexual difference

exists in the play-impulse, that a boy gets more pleasure from a horse

and rider and a soldier than from a doll, while with the girl the

opposite is the case, is proof that an hereditary connection exists

between the perception of certain things (horse, doll, etc.), and the

feeling of pleasure, as well as between this latter and the impulse to

play."[385]

There is another sort of human play, into which higher æsthetic

feelings enter. I refer to that love of festivities, ceremonies,

ordeals, etc., which seems to be universal in our species. The lowest

savages have their dances, more or less formally conducted. The

various religions have their solemn rites and exercises, and civic and

military power symbolize their grandeur by processions and celebrations

of divers sorts. We have our operas and parties and masquerades. An

element common to all these ceremonial games, as they may be called,

is the excitement of concerted action as one of an organized crowd.

The same acts, performed with a crowd, seem to mean vastly more than

when performed alone. A walk with the people on a holiday afternoon,

an excursion to drink beer or coffee at a popular 'resort,' or an

ordinary ball-room, are examples of this. Not only are we amused at

seeing so many strangers, but there is a distinct stimulation at

feeling our share in their collective life. The perception of them is

the stimulus; and our reaction upon it is our tendency to join them

and do what they are doing, and our unwillingness to be the first to

leave off and go home alone. This seems a primitive element in our

nature, as it is difficult to trace any association of ideas that could

lead up to it; although, once granting it to exist, it is very easy

to see what its uses to a tribe might be in facilitating prompt and

vigorous collective action. The formation of armies and the undertaking

of military expeditions would be among its fruits. In the ceremonial

games it is but the impulsive starting-point. What particular things

the crowd then shall do, depends for the most part on the initiative of

individuals, fixed by imitation and habit, and continued by tradition.

The co-operation of other æsthetic pleasures with games, ceremonial

or other, has a great deal to do with the selection of such as shall

become stereotyped and habitual. The peculiar form of excitement

called by Professor Bain the emotion of _pursuit_, the pleasure of

a _crescendo_, is the soul of many common games. The immense extent

of the play-activities in human life is too obvious to be more than

mentioned.[386]

* * * * *

_Curiosity._ Already pretty low down among vertebrates we find that

any object may excite attention, provided it be only _novel_, and that

attention may be followed by approach and exploration by nostril, lips,

or touch. Curiosity and fear form a couple of antagonistic emotions

liable to be awakened by the same outward thing, and manifestly both

useful to their possessor. The spectacle of their alternation is often

amusing enough, as in the timid approaches and scared wheelings which

sheep or cattle will make in the presence of some new object they are

investigating. I have seen alligators in the water act in precisely the

same way towards a man seated on the beach in front of them--gradually

drawing near as long as he kept still, frantically careering back as

soon as he made a movement. Inasmuch as new objects _may_ always be

advantageous, it is better that an animal should not _absolutely_

fear them. But, inasmuch as they may also possibly be harmful, it is

better that he should not be quite indifferent to them either, but on

the whole remaining on the _qui vive_, ascertain as much about them,

and what they may be likely to bring forth, as he can, before settling

down to rest in their presence. Some such susceptibility for being

excited and irritated by the mere novelty, as such, of any movable

feature of the environment must form the instinctive basis of all human

curiosity; though, of course, the superstructure absorbs contributions

from so many other factors of the emotional life that the original

root may be hard to find. With what is called scientific curiosity,

and with metaphysical wonder, the practical instinctive root has

probably nothing to do. The stimuli here are not objects, but ways of

conceiving objects; and the emotions and actions they give rise to are

to be classed, with many other æsthetic manifestations, sensitive and

motor, as _incidental_ features of our mental life. The philosophic

brain responds to an inconsistency or a gap in its knowledge, just as

the musical brain responds to a discord in what it hears. At certain

ages the sensitiveness to particular gaps and the pleasure of resolving

particular puzzles reach their maximum, and then it is that stores of

scientific knowledge are easiest and most naturally laid in. But these

effects may have had nothing to do with the uses for which the brain

was originally given; and it is probably only within a few centuries,

since religious beliefs and economic applications of science have

played a prominent part in the conflicts of one race with another,

that they may have helped to 'select' for survival a particular type

of brain. I shall have to consider this matter of incidental and

supernumerary faculties in Chapter XXVIII.

_Sociability and Shyness._ As a gregarious animal, man is excited

both by the absence and by the presence of his kind. To be alone is

one of the greatest of evils for him. Solitary confinement is by many

regarded as a mode of torture too cruel and unnatural for civilized

countries to adopt. To one long pent up on a desert island, the sight

of a human footprint or a human form in the distance would be the most

tumultuously exciting of experiences. In morbid states of mind, one

of the commonest symptoms is the fear of being alone. This fear may

be assuaged by the presence of a little child, or even of a baby. In

a case of hydrophobia known to the writer, the patient insisted on

keeping his room _crowded_ with neighbors all the while, so intense was

his fear of solitude. In a gregarious animal, the perception that he

is alone excites him to vigorous activity. Mr. Galton thus describes

the behavior of the South African cattle whom he had such good

opportunities for observing:

"Although the ox has little affection for, or interest in, his

fellows, he cannot endure even a momentary separation from his herd.

If he be separated from it by stratagem or force, he exhibits every

sign of mental agony; he strives with all his might to get back again,

and when he succeeds he plunges into its middle to bathe his whole

body with the comfort of closest companionship."[387]

Man is also excited by the presence of his kind. The _bizarre_

actions of dogs meeting strange dogs are not altogether without a

parallel in our own constitution. We cannot meet strangers without a

certain tension, or talk to them exactly as to our familiars. This is

particularly the case if the stranger be an important personage. It may

then happen that we not only shrink from meeting his eye, but actually

cannot collect our wits or do ourselves any sort of justice in his

presence.

"This odd state of mind," says Darwin,[388] "is chiefly recognized by

the face reddening, by the eyes being averted or cast down, and by

awkward, nervous movements of the body.... Shyness seems to depend on

sensitiveness to the opinion, whether good or bad, of others, more

especially with respect to external appearance. Strangers neither know

nor care anything about our conduct or character, but they may, and

often do, criticise our appearance.... The consciousness of anything

peculiar, or even new, in the dress, or any slight blemish on the

person, and more especially on the face--points which are likely

to attract the attention of strangers--makes the shy intolerably

shy.[389] On the other hand, in those cases in which conduct, and not

personal appearance, is concerned, we are much more apt to be shy in

the presence of acquaintances whose judgment we in some degree value

than in that of strangers.... Some persons, however, are so sensitive

that the mere act of speaking to almost any one is sufficient to

rouse their self-consciousness, and a slight blush is the result.

Disapprobation ... causes shyness and blushing much more readily than

does approbation.... Persons who are exceedingly shy are rarely shy in

the presence of those with whom they are quite familiar, and of whose

good opinion and sympathy they are quite assured; for instance, a girl

in presence of her mother.... Shyness ... is closely related to fear;

yet it is distinct from fear in the ordinary sense. A shy man dreads

the notice of strangers, but can hardly be said to be afraid of them;

he may be as bold as a hero in battle, and yet have no self-confidence

about trifles in the presence of strangers. Almost every one is

extremely nervous when first addressing a public assembly, and most

men remain so through their lives."

As Mr. Darwin observes, a real dread of definite consequences may

enter into this 'stage-fright' and complicate the shyness. Even so

our shyness before an important personage may be complicated by what

Professor Bain calls 'servile terror,' based on representation of

definite dangers if we fail to please. But both stage-fright and

servile terror may exist with the most indefinite apprehensions of

danger, and, in fact, when our reason tells us there is no occasion for

alarm. We must, therefore, admit a certain amount of purely instinctive

perturbation and constraint, due to the consciousness that we have

become objects for other people's eyes. Mr. Darwin goes on to say:

"Shyness comes on at a very early age. In one of my own children, two

years and three months old, I saw a trace of what certainly appeared to

be shyness directed toward myself, after an absence from home of only a

week." Every parent has noticed the same sort of thing. Considering the

despotic powers of rulers in savage tribes, respect and awe must, from

time immemorial, have been emotions excited by certain individuals; and

stage-fright, servile terror, and shyness, must have had as copious

opportunities for exercise as at the present time. Whether these

impulses could ever have been useful, and selected for usefulness, is

a question which, it would seem, can only be answered in the negative.

Apparently they are pure hindrances, like fainting at sight of blood

or disease, sea-sickness, a dizzy head on high places, and certain

squeamishnesses of æsthetic taste. They are _incidental_ emotions, in

spite of which we get along. But they seem to play an important part

in the production of two other propensities, about the instinctive

character of which a good deal of controversy has prevailed. I refer

to cleanliness and modesty, to which we must proceed, but not before

we have said a word about another impulse closely allied to shyness. I

mean--

* * * * *

_Secretiveness_, which, although often due to intelligent calculation

and the dread of betraying our interests in some more or less

definitely foreseen way, is quite as often a blind propensity, serving

no useful purpose, and is so stubborn and ineradicable a part of the

character as fully to deserve a place among the instincts. Its natural

stimuli are unfamiliar human beings, especially those whom we respect.

Its reactions are the arrest of whatever we are saying or doing when

such strangers draw nigh, coupled often with the pretense that we were

not saying or doing that thing, but possibly something different.

Often there is added to this a disposition to mendacity when asked to

give an account of ourselves. With many persons the first impulse,

when the door-bell rings, or a visitor is suddenly announced, is to

scuttle out of the room, so as not to be 'caught.' When a person at

whom we have been looking becomes aware of us, our immediate impulse

may be to look the other way, and pretend we have not seen him. Many

friends have confessed to me that this is a frequent phenomenon with

them in meeting acquaintances in the street, especially unfamiliar

ones. The bow is a secondary correction of the primary feint that we

do not see the other person. Probably most readers will recognize in

themselves, at least, the _start_, the nascent disposition, on many

occasions, to act in each and all of these several ways. That the

'start' is neutralized by second thought proves it to come from a

deeper region than thought. There is unquestionably a native impulse in

every one to conceal love-affairs, and the acquired impulse to conceal

pecuniary affairs seems in many to be almost equally strong. It is to

be noted that even where a given habit of concealment is reflective and

deliberate, its motive is far less often definite prudence than a vague

aversion to have one's sanctity invaded and one's personal concerns

fingered and turned over by other people. Thus, some persons will never

leave anything with their name written on it, where others may pick

it up--even in the woods, an old envelope must not be thrown on the

ground. Many cut all the leaves of a book of which they may be reading

a single chapter, so that no one shall know which one they have singled

out, and all this with no _definite_ notion of harm. The impulse to

conceal is more apt to be provoked by superiors than by equals or

inferiors. How differently do boys talk together when their parents are

not by! Servants see more of their masters' characters than masters of

servants'.[390] Where we conceal from our equals and familiars, there

is probably always a definite element of prudential prevision involved.

_Collective_ secrecy, mystery, enters into the emotional interest of

many games, and is one of the elements of the importance men attach to

freemasonries of various sorts, being delightful apart from any end.

* * * * *

_Cleanliness._ Seeing how very filthy savages and exceptional

individuals among civilized people may be, philosophers have doubted

whether any genuine instinct of cleanliness exists, and whether

education and habit be not responsible for whatever amount of it

is found. Were it an instinct, its stimulus would be dirt, and its

characteristic reaction the shrinking from contact therewith, and the

cleaning of it away after contact had occurred. Now, if some animals

are cleanly, men _may_ be so, and there can be no doubt that some

kinds of matter _are_ natively repugnant, both to sight, touch, and

smell--excrementitious and putrid things, blood, pus, entrails, and

diseased tissues, for example. It is true that the shrinking from

contact with these things may be inhibited very easily, as by a medical

education; and it is equally true that the impulse to clean them

away may be inhibited by so slight an obstacle as the thought of the

coldness of the ablution, or the necessity of getting up to perform it.

It is also true than an impulse to cleanliness, habitually checked,

will become obsolete fast enough. But none of these facts prove the

impulse never to have been there.[391] It seems to be there in all

cases; and then to be particularly amenable to outside influences, the

child having his own degree of squeamishness about what he shall touch

or eat, and later being either hardened or made more fastidious still

by the habits he is forced to acquire and the examples among which he

lives.

Examples get their hold on him in this way, that a particularly

evil-smelling or catarrhal or lousy comrade is rather offensive to

him, and that he sees the odiousness in another of an amount of dirt

to which he would have no spontaneous objection if it were on his

own skin. That _we dislike in others things which we tolerate in

ourselves_ is a law of our æsthetic nature about which there can be

no doubt. But as soon as generalization and reflection step in, this

judging of others leads to a new way of regarding ourselves. "Who

taught you politeness? The impolite," is, I believe, a Chinese proverb.

The concept, 'dirty fellow,' which we have formed, becomes one under

which we personally shrink from being classed; and so we 'wash up,'

and set ourselves right, at moments when our social self-consciousness

is awakened, in a manner toward which no strictly instinctive native

prompting exists. But the standard of cleanliness attained in this way

is not likely to go beyond the mutual tolerance for one another of the

members of the tribe, and hence may comport a good deal of actual filth.

* * * * *

_Modesty, Shame._ Whether there be an instinctive impulse to hide

certain parts of the body and certain acts is perhaps even more open to

doubt than whether there be an instinct of cleanliness. Anthropologists

have denied it, and in the utter shamelessness of infancy and of many

savage tribes have seemed to find a good basis for their views. It

must, however, be remembered that infancy proves nothing, and that, as

far as sexual modesty goes, the sexual impulse itself works directly

against it at times of excitement, and with reference to certain

people; and that habits of immodesty contracted with those people

may forever afterwards inhibit it any impulse to be modest towards

_them_. This would account for a great deal of actual immodesty, even

if an original modest impulse were there. On the other hand, the

modest impulse, if it do exist, must be admitted to have a singularly

ill-defined sphere of influence, both as regards the presences that

call it forth, and as regards the acts to which it leads. Ethnology

shows it to have very little backbone of its own, and to follow

easily fashion and example. Still, it is hard to see the ubiquity of

_some_ sort of tribute to shame, however perverted--as where female

modesty consists in covering the face alone, or immodesty in appearing

before strangers unpainted--and to believe it to have no impulsive

root whatever. Now, what may the impulsive root be? I believe that,

for one thing, it is shyness, the feeling of dread that unfamiliar

persons, as explained above, may inspire us withal. Such persons are

the original stimuli to our modesty.[392] But the actions of modesty

are quite different from the actions of shyness. They consist of the

restraint of certain bodily functions, and of the covering of certain

parts; and why do such particular actions necessarily ensue? That

there _may_ be in the human animal, as such, a 'blind' and immediate

automatic impulse to such restraints and coverings in respect-inspiring

presences is a possibility difficult of actual disproof. But it

seems more likely, from the facts, that the actions of modesty are

suggested to us in a roundabout way; and that, even more than those of

cleanliness, they arise from the application in the second instance

to ourselves of judgments primarily passed upon our mates. It is not

easy to believe that, even among the nakedest savages, an unusual

degree of cynicism and indecency in an individual should not beget a

certain degree of contempt, and cheapen him in his neighbor's eyes.

Human nature is sufficiently homogeneous for us to be sure that

everywhere reserve must inspire some respect, and that persons who

suffer every liberty are persons whom others disregard. Not to be like

such people, then, would be one of the first resolutions suggested by

social self-consciousness to a child of nature just emerging from the

unreflective state. And the resolution would probably acquire effective

pungency for the first time when the social self-consciousness was

sharpened into a real fit of shyness by some person being present whom

it was important not to disgust or displease. Public opinion would

of course go on to build its positive precepts upon this germ; and,

through a variety of examples and experiences, the ritual of modesty

would grow, until it reached the New England pitch of sensitiveness and

range, making us say stomach instead of belly, limb instead of leg,

retire instead of go to bed, and forbidding us to call a female dog by

name.

At bottom this amounts to the admission that, though in some shape or

other a natural and inevitable feature of human life, modesty need not

necessarily be an instinct in the pure and simple excito-motor sense of

the term.

* * * * *

_Love._ Of all propensities, the sexual impulses bear on their face

the most obvious signs of being instinctive, in the sense of blind,

automatic, and untaught. The teleology they contain is often at

variance with the wishes of the individuals concerned; and the actions

are performed for no assignable reason but because Nature urges just

that way. Here, if ever, then, we ought to find those characters of

fatality, infallibility, and uniformity, which, we are told, make of

actions done from instinct a class so utterly apart. But is this so?

The facts are just the reverse: the sexual instinct is particularly

liable to be checked and modified by slight differences in the

individual stimulus, by the inward condition of the agent himself,

by habits once acquired, and by the antagonism of contrary impulses

operating on the mind. One of these is the ordinary shyness recently

described; another is what might be called the _anti-sexual instinct_,

the instinct of personal isolation, the actual repulsiveness to us

of the idea of intimate contact with most of the persons we meet,

especially those of our own sex.[393] Thus it comes about that this

strongest passion of all, so far from being the most 'irresistible,'

may, on the contrary, be the hardest one to give rein to, and that

individuals in whom the inhibiting influences are potent may pass

through life and never find an occasion to have it gratified. There

could be no better proof of the truth of that proposition with which we

began our study of the instinctive life in man, that irregularity of

behavior may come as well from the possession of too many instincts as

from the lack of any at all.

The instinct of personal isolation, of which we have spoken, exists

more strongly in men with respect to one another, and more strongly in

women with respect to men. In women it is called coyness, and has to be

positively overcome by a process of wooing before the sexual instinct

inhibits it and takes its place. As Darwin has shown in his book on

the 'Descent of Man and Sexual Selection,' it has played a vital part

in the amelioration of all higher animal types, and is to a great

degree responsible for whatever degree of chastity the human race may

show. It illustrates strikingly, however, the law of the inhibition of

instincts by habits--for, once broken through with a given person, it

is not apt to assert itself again; and habitually broken through, as by

prostitutes, with various persons, it may altogether decay. Habit also

fixes it in us toward certain individuals: nothing is so particularly

displeasing as the notion of close personal contact with those whom

we have long known in a respectful and distant way. The fondness of

the ancients and of modern Orientals for forms of unnatural vice, of

which the notion affects us with horror, is probably a mere case of the

way in which this instinct may be inhibited by habit. We can hardly

suppose that the ancients had by gift of Nature a propensity of which

we are devoid, and were all victims of what is now a pathological

aberration limited to individuals. It is more probable that with them

the instinct of physical aversion toward a certain class of objects

was inhibited early in life by _habits_, formed under the influence

of _example_; and that then a kind of sexual appetite, of which very

likely most men possess the germinal possibility, developed itself in

an unrestricted way. That the development of it in an abnormal way may

check its development in the normal way, seems to be a well-ascertained

medical fact. And that the direction of the sexual instinct towards one

individual tends to inhibit its application to other individuals, is a

law, upon which, though it suffers many exceptions, the whole _régime_

of monogamy is based. These details are a little unpleasant to discuss,

but they show so beautifully the correctness of the general principles

in the light of which our review has been made, that it was impossible

to pass them over unremarked.

* * * * *

_Jealousy_ is unquestionably instinctive.

* * * * *

_Parental Love_ is an instinct stronger in woman than in man, at least

in the early childhood of its object. I need do little more than quote

Schneider's lively description of it as it exists in her:

"As soon as a wife becomes a mother her whole thought and feeling,

her whole being, is altered. Until then she had only thought of her

own well-being, of the satisfaction of her vanity; the whole world

appeared made only for her; everything that went on about her was only

noticed so far as it had personal reference to herself; she asked

of every one that he should appear interested in her, pay her the

requisite attention, and as far as possible fulfil her wishes. Now,

however, the centre of the world is no longer herself, but her child.

She does not think of her own hunger, she must first be sure that the

child is fed. It is nothing to her that she herself is tired and needs

rest, so long as she sees that the child's sleep is disturbed; the

moment it stirs she awakes, though far stronger noises fail to arouse

her now. She, who formerly could not bear the slightest carelessness

of dress, and touched everything with gloves, allows herself to be

soiled by the infant, and does not shrink from seizing its clouts with

her naked hands. Now, she has the greatest patience with the ugly,

piping cry-baby (_Schreihals_), whereas until now every discordant

sound, every slightly unpleasant noise, made her nervous. Every limb

of the still hideous little being appears to her beautiful, every

movement fills her with delight. She has, in one word, transferred her

entire egoism to the child, and lives only in it. Thus, at least, it

is in all unspoiled, naturally-bred mothers, who, alas! seem to be

growing rarer; and thus it is with all the higher animal-mothers. The

maternal joys of a cat, for example, are not to be disguised. With

an expression of infinite comfort she stretches out her fore-legs to

offer her teats to her children, and moves her tail with delight when

the little hungry mouths tug and suck.... But not only the contact,

the bare look of the offspring affords endless delight, not only

because the mother thinks that the child will some day grow great and

handsome and bring her many joys, but because she has received from

Nature an instinctive love for her children. She does not herself know

why she is so happy, and why the look of the child and the care of it

are so agreeable, any more than the young man can give an account of

why he loves a maiden, and is so happy when she is near. Few mothers,

in caring for their child, think of the proper purpose of maternal

love for the preservation of the species. Such a thought may arise

in the father's mind; seldom in that of the mother. The latter feels

only... that it is an everlasting delight to hold the being which she

has brought forth protectingly in her arms, to dress it, to wash it,

to rock it to sleep, or to still its hunger."

So far the worthy Schneider, to whose words may be added this remark,

that the passionate devotion of a mother--ill herself, perhaps--to

a sick or dying child is perhaps the most simply beautiful moral

spectacle that human life affords. Contemning every danger, triumphing

over every difficulty, outlasting all fatigue, woman's love is here

invincibly superior to anything that man can show.

* * * * *

These are the most prominent of the tendencies which are worthy of

being called instinctive in the human species.[394] It will be

observed that _no other mammal, not even the monkey, shows so large

an array._ In a perfectly-rounded development, every one of these

instincts would start a habit toward certain objects and inhibit a

habit toward certain others. Usually this is the case; but, in the

one-sided development of civilized life, it happens that the timely age

goes by in a sort of starvation of objects, and the individual then

grows up with gaps in his psychic constitution which future experiences

can never fill. Compare the accomplished gentleman with the poor

artisan or tradesman of a city: during the adolescence of the former,

objects appropriate to his growing interests, bodily and mental, were

offered as fast as the interests awoke, and, as a consequence, he is

armed and equipped at every angle to meet the world. Sport came to the

rescue and completed his education where real things were lacking. He

has tasted of the essence of every side of human life, being sailor,

hunter, athlete, scholar, fighter, talker, dandy, man of affairs, etc.,

all in one. Over the city poor boy's youth no such golden opportunities

were hung, and in his manhood no desires for most of them exist.

Fortunate it is for him if gaps are the only anomalies his instinctive

life presents; perversions are too often the fruit of his unnatural

bringing up.

* * * * *

[360] This chapter has already appeared (almost exactly as now printed)

in the form of magazine articles in Scribner's Magazine and in the

Popular Science Monthly for 1887.

[361] P. A. Chadbourne: Instinct, p. 28 (New York, 1872).

[362] "It would be very simple-minded to suppose that bees follow their

queen, and protect her and care for her, because they are aware that

without her the hive would become extinct. The odor or the aspect of

their queen is manifestly agreeable to the bees--that is why they love

her so. Does not all true love base itself on agreeable perceptions

much more than on representations of utility?" (G. H. Schneider, Der

Thierische Wille, p. 187.) _A priori_, there is no reason to suppose

that _any_ sensation might not in _some_ animal cause _any_ emotion and

_any_ impulse. To us it seems unnatural that an odor should directly

excite anger or fear; or a color, lust. Yet there are creatures to

which some smells are quite as frightful as any sounds, and very likely

others to which color is as much a sexual irritant as form.

[363] Der Thierische Wille, pp. 282-3.

[364] In the instincts of mammals, and even of lower creatures, the

uniformity and infallibility which, a generation ago, were considered

as essential characters do not exist. The minuter study of recent years

has found continuity, transition, variation, and mistake, wherever

it has looked for them, and decided that what is called an instinct

is usually only a tendency to act in a way of which the _average_ is

pretty constant, but which need not be mathematically 'true.' Cf. on

this point Darwin's Origin of Species: Romanes's Mental Evol., chaps.

xi to xvi incl., and Appendix; W. L. Lindsay's Mind in Lower Animals,

vol. i. 133-141: ii. chaps. v, xx; and K. Semper's Conditions of

Existence in Animals, where a great many instances will be found.

[365] Spalding, Macmillan's Magazine, Feb. 1878, p. 287.

[366] _Ibid._ p. 289.

[367] For the cases in full see Mental Evolution in Animals, pp.

213-317.

[368] Transactions of American Neurological Association, vol. i. p. 129

(1875).

[369] "Mr. Spalding," says Mr. Lewes (Problems of Life and Mind, prob.

i. chap. ii. § 22, note), "tells me of a friend of his who reared a

gosling in the kitchen, away from all water; when this bird was some

months old, and was taken to a pond, it not only refused to go into

the water, but when thrown in scrambled out again, as a hen would

have done. Here was an instinct entirely suppressed." See a similar

observation on ducklings in T. R. R. Stebbing: Essays on Darwinism

(London, 1871), p. 73.

[370] Senses and Intellect. 3d ed. pp. 413-675.

[371] Nature, xii. 507 (1875).

[372] See, for some excellent pedagogic remarks about _doing yourself_

what you want to get your pupils to do, and not simply telling them to

do it: Baumann, Handbuch der Moral (1879), p. 32 ff.

[373] Sympathy has been enormously written about in books on Ethics.

A very good recent chapter is that by Thos. Fowler: The Principles of

Morals, part ii. chap. ii.

[374] "I must now refer to a very general passion which occurs in boys

who are brought up naturally, especially in the country. Everyone knows

what pleasure a boy takes in the sight of a butterfly, fish, crab or

other animal, or of a bird's nest, and what a strong propensity he

has for pulling apart, breaking, opening, and destroying all complex

objects, how he delights in pulling out the wings and legs of flies,

and tormenting one animal or another, how greedy he is to steal secret

dainties, with what irresistible strength the plundering of birds'

nests attracts him without his having the least intention of eating

the eggs or the young birds. This fact has long been familiar, and is

daily remarked by teachers; but an explanation of these impulses which

follow upon a mere perception of the objects, without in most cases

any representation being aroused of a future pleasure to be gained,

has as yet been given by no one, and yet the impulses are very easy

to explain. In many cases it will be said that the boy pulls things

apart from curiosity. Quite correct: but whence comes this curiosity,

this irresistible desire to open everything and see what is inside?

What makes the boy take the eggs from the nest and destroy them when

he never thinks of eating them? These are effects of an hereditary

instinct, so strong that warnings and punishments are unable to

counteract it." (Schneider: Der Menschliche Wille, p. 224. See also Der

Thierische Wille, pp. 180-2.)

[375] It is not surprising, in view of the facts of animal history and

evolution, that the very special object blood should have become the

stimulus for a very special interest and excitement. That the sight of

it should make people faint is strange. Less so that a child who sees

his blood flow should forthwith become much more frightened than by

the mere feeling of the cut. Horned cattle often, though not always,

become furiously excited at the smell of blood. In some abnormal human

beings the sight or thought of it exerts a baleful fascination. "B and

his father were at a neighbor's one evening, and, while paring apples,

the old man accidentally cut his hand so severely as to cause the

blood to flow profusely. B was observed to become restless, nervous,

pale, and to have undergone a peculiar change in demeanor. Taking

advantage of the distraction produced by the accident, B escaped from

the house and proceeded to a neighboring farm-yard, where he cut the

throat of a horse, killing it." Dr. D. H. Tuke, commenting on this

man's case (Journal of Mental Science, October, 1885), speaks of the

influence of blood upon him--his whole life had been one chain of

cowardly atrocities--and continues: "There can be no doubt that with

some individuals it constitutes a fascination.... We might speak of a

_mania sanguinis_. Dr. Savage admitted a man from France into Bethlehem

Hospital some time ago, one of whose earliest symptoms of insanity

was the thirst for blood, which he endeavored to satisfy by going to

an abattoir in Paris. The man whose case I have brought forward had

the same passion for gloating over blood, but had no attack of acute

mania. The sight of blood was distinctly a delight to him, and at any

time blood aroused in him the worst elements of his nature. Instances

will easily be recalled in which murderers, undoubtedly insane, have

described the intense pleasure they experienced in the warm blood of

children."

[376] "Bombonnel, having rolled with a panther to the border of a

ravine, gets his head away from the open mouth of the animal, and by

a prodigious effort rolls her into the abyss. He gets up, blinded,

spitting a mass of blood, not knowing exactly what the situation is.

He thinks only of one thing, that he shall probably die of his wounds,

but that before dying he must take vengeance on the panther. 'I didn't

think of my pain,' he tells us. 'Possessed entirely by the fury with

which I was transported, I drew my hunting-knife, and not understanding

what had become of the beast, I sought for her on every side in order

to continue the struggle. It was in this plight that the Arabs found me

when they arrived.'" (Quoted by Guyan, La Morale sans Obligation, etc.,

p. 210.)

[377] Psychologie de l'Enfant, pp. 72-74. In an account of a young

gorilla quoted from Falkenstein, by R. Hartmann ('Anthropoid Apes,'

International Scientific Series, vol. lii (New York, 1886), p. 265),

it is said: "He very much disliked strange noises. Thunder, the rain

falling on the skylight, and especially the long-drawn note of a

pipe or trumpet, threw him into such agitation us to cause a sudden

affection of the digestive organs, and it became expedient to keep him

at a distance. When he was slightly indisposed, we made use of this

kind of music with results as successful as if we had administered

purgative medicine."

[378] Der Menschliche Wille, p. 224.

[379] Cf. Romanes. Mental Evolution, etc., p. 156.

[380] In the 'Overland Monthly' for 1887, a most interesting article

on Laura Bridgman's writings has been published by Mr. E. C. Sandford.

Among other reminiscences of her early childhood, while she still knew

nothing of the sign-language, the wonderful blind deaf-mute records the

following item in her quaint language: "My father [he was a farmer and

probably did his own butchering] used to enter his kitchen bringing

some killed animals in and deposited them on one of sides of the room

many times. As I perceived it it make me shudder with terror because

I did not know what the matter was. I hated to approach the dead. One

morning I went to take a short walk with my Mother. I went into a snug

house for some time. They took me into a room where there was a coffin.

I put my hand in the coffin & felt something so queer. It frightened

me unpleasantly. I found something dead wrapped in a silk h'd'k'f so

carefully. It must have been a body that had had vitality.... I did not

like to venture to examine the body for I was confounded."

[381] I lately saw a boy of five (who had been told the story of Hector

and Achilles) teaching his younger brother, aged three, how to play

Hector, while he himself should play Achilles, and chase him round the

walls of Troy. Having armed themselves, Achilles advanced, shouting

"Where's my Patroklos?" Whereupon the would-be Hector piped up, quite

distracted from his _rôle_, "Where's my Patroklos? I want a Patroklos!

I want a Patroklos!"--and broke up the game. Of what kind of a thing

a Patroklos might be he had, of course, no notion--enough that his

brother had one for him to claim one too.

[382] In 'The Nation' for September 3, 1886, President G. S. Hall has

given some account of a statistical research on Boston school-boys,

by Miss Wiltse, from which it appears that only nineteen out of two

hundred and twenty-nine had made no collections.

[383] Quoted in Lindsay, 'Mind in Lower Animals,' vol. ii. p. 151.

[384] Cf. Flint, Mind, vol. i. pp. 330-383; Sully, _ibid._ p. 567. Most

people probably have the _impulse_ to keep bits of useless finery, old

tools, pieces of once useful apparatus, etc.; but it is normally either

inhibited at the outset by reflection, or, if yielded to, the objects

soon grow displeasing and are thrown away.

[385] Der Menschliche Wille, p. 205.

[386] Professor Lazarus (Die Reize des Spieles, Berlin, 1883, p. 44)

denies that we have an _instinct_ to play, and says the root of the

matter is the _aversion to remain unoccupied_, which substitutes a

sham occupation when no real one is ready. No doubt this is true; but

why the particular forms of sham occupation? The _elements_ of all

bodily games and of ceremonial games are given by direct excito-motor

stimulations--just as when puppies chase one another and swallows have

a parliament.

[387] Inquiries into Human Faculty, p. 72.

[388] Expression of the Emotions (New York, 1873), p. 330.

[389] "The certainty that we are well dressed," a charming woman has

said, "gives us a peace of heart compared to which that yielded by the

consolations of religion is as nothing."

[390] Thackeray, in his exquisite Roundabout Paper, 'On a Chalk-Mark

on the Door,' says: "You get truth habitually from equals only; so, my

good Mr. Holyshade, don't talk to me about the habitual candor of the

young Etonian of high birth, or I have my own opinion of _your_ candor

or discernment when you do. No. Tom Bowling is the soul of honor, and

has been true to Black-eyed Syousan since the last time they parted

at Wapping Old Stairs; but do you suppose Tom is perfectly frank,

familiar, and above-board in his conversation with Admiral Nelson, K.

C. B.? There are secrets, prevarications, fibs, if you will, between

Tom and the admiral--between your crew (of servants) and _their_

captain. I know I hire a worthy, clean, agreeable, and conscientious

male or female hypocrite at so many guineas a year to do so and so for

me. Were he other than hypocrite, I would send him about his business."

[391] The insane symptom called "mysophobia," or dread of foulness,

which leads a patient to wash his hands perhaps a hundred times a day,

hardly seems explicable without supposing a primitive impulse to clean

one's self of which it is, as it were, the convulsive exaggeration.

[392] "We often find modesty coming in only in the presence of

foreigners, especially of clothed Europeans. Only before these do the

Indian women in Brazil cover themselves with their girdle, only before

these do the women on Timor conceal their bosom. In Australia we find

the same thing happening." (Th. Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker,

vol. i. p 358.) The author gives bibliographical references, which I

omit.

[393] To most of us it is even unpleasant to sit down in a chair still

warm from occupancy by another person's body. To many, hand-shaking is

disagreeable.

[394] Some will, of course, find the list too large, others too small.

With the boundaries of instinct fading into reflex action below, and

into acquired habit or suggested activity above, it is likely that

there will always be controversy about just what to include under the

class-name. Shall we add the propensity to walk along a curbstone, or

any other narrow path, to the list of instincts? Shall we subtract

secretiveness, as due to shyness or to fear? Who knows? Meanwhile

our physiological method has this inestimable advantage, that such

questions of limit have neither theoretical nor practical importance.

The facts once noted, it matters little how they are named. Most

authors give a shorter list than that in the text. The phrenologists

add adhesiveness, inhabitiveness, love of approbation, etc., etc.,

to their list of 'sentiments,' which in the main agree with our list

of instincts. Fortlage, in his System der Psychologie, classes among

the _Triebe_ all the vegetative physiological functions. Santlus (Zur

Psychologie der Menschlichen Triebe, Leipsic, 1864) says there are at

bottom but three instincts, that of 'Being,' that of 'Function,' and

that of 'Life.' The 'Instinct of Being' he subdivides into _animal_,

embracing the activities of all the senses; and _psychical_, embracing

the acts of the intellect and of the 'transempiric consciousness.'

The 'Instinct of Function' he divides into _sexual, inclinational_

(friendship, attachment, honor); and _moral_ (religion, philanthropy,

faith, truth, moral freedom, etc.). The 'Instinct of Life' embraces

_conservation_ (nutrition, motion); _sociability_ (imitation,

juridical and ethical arrangements); and _personal interest_ (love

of independence and freedom, acquisitiveness, self-defence). Such

a muddled list as this shows how great are the advantages of the

physiological analysis we have used.