272 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



The recognition of the true role of instinct in human social life will 

 serve at once as a basis for scientific social work and as a means of 

 transcending the purely instinctive plane of social activity. It would 

 seem, therefore, that the practical consequence of the recognition of the 

 importance of the instinctive element in human social life would be to 

 establish a wise conservatism with reference to the reconstruction of 

 institutions and at the same time a progressive radicalism as regards the 

 ultimate amelioration of social conditions. Any plan of social reor- 

 ganization which is made without regard to man's instincts is probably 

 destined to meet with as great failure as any plan of individual educa- 

 tion which is made without regard to native impulses and capacities. 

 On the other hand, human instincts are indefinitely modifiable, through 

 selection in the race and through education in the individual. There is 

 nothing in them, therefore, which can put any permanent obstacle in 

 the way of carrying out any rational measure of social reform, although 

 the recognition of instinct as at the basis of human social life, points to 

 the conclusion that the only sure and probably the only safe method of 

 social reconstruction is through education. When the instinctive ele- 

 ment is thoroughly understood it certainly can be controlled, and in 

 this sense transcended. 



As we have seen, man's instincts were created by the selective influ- 

 ence of past living conditions. It is hardly probable that civilization 

 has as yet very greatly altered the instincts of civilized man from those 

 of the barbarian and the savage. Those persons who, like Fourier, 

 claim that the instincts and the correlated emotions should be the 

 supreme guide in social life would plunge society again into barbarism. 

 Our instincts, as Professor Thorndike remarks, would be a much better 

 guide if we were still living a wild life in the woods than they are in 

 our complex civilized society. It is the dominance of instinctive con- 

 trol and of instinctive activities in existing society, rather than of 

 rational control and rational activities, in other words, which creates 

 many of the problems of our present civilization. As Sir Francis 

 Galton has pointed out, many of these problems are due to the fact that 

 man's instincts are not yet adjusted to the new and complex social con- 

 ditions in which he finds himself. It is idle to think that it is practical 

 to secure such adjustment through the elimination of socially unde- 

 sirable natural tendencies by any means of artificial selection. That is 

 too far in the future to be worthy of serious discussion. The only 

 means which remains, therefore, of adjusting man to the requirements 

 of a complex social life is to modify and control instinctive activities by 

 a system of scientific education of the young, that is, by a system of 

 social character building. The great problem of civilized society, there- 

 fore, is not to suppress man's instincts, for that can not be done, but to 

 guide and control them by a system of scientific education, so that they 

 will discharge themselves only in paths of social advantage. 



