SOME HUMAN INSTINCTS. 163 



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

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

 reflections, and calculations may either check or re-enforce ; 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. 



Pugnacity and anger. In many respects man is the most ruthless- 

 ly ferocious of beasts. As with all gregarious animals, "two souls," as 

 Faust says, " dwell within his breast," the one of sociability and help- 

 fulness, the other of jealousy and antagonism to his mates. Though 

 in a general way he can not live without them, yet, as regards certain 

 individuals, it often falls out that be can not 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 helium 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 vir- 

 tues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any mo- 

 ment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of charac- 

 ter by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming 

 others, but themselves unharmed. 



The hunting instinct has an equally remote origin in the evolu- 

 tion of the race. The hunting: and the fig-hting; 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 imme- 

 diate 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 primi- 

 tive attribute of our nature, but either a semblance or a resultant of 

 the subtile combination of other less maligmant 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 



