SOME HUMAN INSTINCTS. 66 7 



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 cir- 

 cumstances 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 acci- 

 dentally it be begun by a person with the collecting instinct, it will 

 probably be continued. The chief interest of the objects, in the col- 

 lector'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 photo- 

 graphs. Out of a hundred students whom I questioned, only four or 

 five had never collected anything. In " The Nation " for September 3, 

 1886, Professor G. S. Hall gives 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 col- 

 lections. 



The associationist psychology denies that there is any blind primi- 

 tive instinct to appropriate, and would explain all acquisitiveness, in 

 the first instance, as a desire to secure the " pleasures " which the ob- 

 jects 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 destruc- 

 tion. 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 



