6 7 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 excrementi- 

 tious 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 that an 

 impulse to cleanliness, habitually checked, will become obsolete fast 

 enough. But none of these facts prove the impulse never to have 

 been there.* It seems to be there in all cases ; and then to be par- 

 ticularly 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 w r ere on his own 

 skin. That we dislike in others things xohich we tolerate in ourselves 

 is a law of our aesthetic 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. 



Modetsy, 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. An- 

 thropologists 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, 



* 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. 



