possession of free will and the mastery of his fate at the very moment when he is showing himself to be a mere puppet dancing to the strings which Nature, unimpressed by his valiant airs, relentlessly and impassively pulls.
The extent of the psychical accompaniments of instinctive activity in civilized man should not, therefore, be allowed to obscure the fact that the instincts are tendencies deeply ingrained in the very structure of his being. They are as necessarily inherited, as much a part of himself, and as essential a condition for the survival of himself and his race, as are the vital organs of his body. {96} Their persistence in him is established and enforced by the effects of millions of years of selection, so that it can scarcely be supposed that a few thousand years of civilized life which have been accompanied by no steady selection against any single instinct can have had any effect whatever in weakening them. The common expression that such an effect has been produced is doubtless due to the great development in civilized man of the mental accompaniments of instinctive processes. These mental phenomena surround the naked reality of the impulse with a cloud of rationalized comment and illusory explanation. The capacity which man possesses for free and rational thought in matters untainted by instinctive inclination is of course indubitable, but he has not realized that there is no obvious mental character attached to propositions having an instinctive basis which should expose them to suspicion. As a matter of fact, it is just those fundamental propositions which owe their origin to instinct which appear to the subject the most obvious, the most axiomatic, and the least liable to doubt by any one but an eccentric or a madman.
It has been customary with certain authors—perhaps especially such as have interested themselves in sociological subjects—to ascribe quite a large number of man’s activities to separate instincts. Very little consideration of most of these propositions shows that they are based upon too lax a definition or a want of analysis, for most of the activities referred to special instincts prove to be derivatives