6 7 3 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



At bottom this amounts to the admission that, though in some 

 shape or other a natural and inevitable feature of human life, modesty 

 need not necessarily be an instinct in the pure and simple excito-motor 

 sense of the term. 



Jjove. Of all propensities, the sexual impulses bear on their face 

 the most obvious signs of being instinctive, in the sense of blind, auto- 

 matic, and untaught. The teleology they contain is often at variance 

 with the wishes of the individuals concerned ; and the actions are per- 

 formed for no assignable reason but because Nature urges just that 

 way. Here, if ever, then, we ought to find those characters of fatality, 

 infallibility, and uniformity, which, we are told, make of actions done 

 from instinct a class so utterly apart. But is this so ? The facts are 

 just the reverse : the sexual instinct is particularly liable to be checked 

 and modified by slight differences in the individual stimulus, by the 

 inward condition of the agent himself, by habits once acquired, and by 

 the antagonism of contrary impulses operating on the mind. One of 

 these is the ordinary shyness recently described ; another is what might 

 be called the anti-sexual instinct, the instinct of personal isolation, 

 the actual repulsiveness to us of the idea of intimate contact with 

 most of the persons we meet, especially those of our own sex.* Thus 

 it comes about that this strongest passion of all, so far from being the 

 most " irresistible," may, on the contrary, be the hardest one to give 

 rein to, and that individuals in whom the inhibiting influences are 

 potent may pass through life and never find an occasion to have it 

 gratified. There could be no better proof of the truth of that propo- 

 sition with which we began our study of the instinctive life in man, 

 that irregularity of behavior may come as well from the possession of 

 too many instincts as from the lack of any at all. 



The instinct of personal isolation, of which we have spoken, exists 

 more strongly in men with respect to one another, and more strongly 

 in women with respect to men. In women it is called coyness, and 

 has to be positively overcome by a process of wooing before the sexual 

 instinct inhibits it and takes its place. As Darwin has shown in his 

 book on the " Descent of Man and Sexual Selection," it has played a 

 vital part in the amelioration of all higher animal types, and is to a 

 great degree responsible for whatever degree of chastity the human 

 race may show. It illustrates strikingly, however, the law of the in- 

 hibition of instincts by habits for, once broken through with a given 

 person, it is not apt to assert itself again ; and habitually broken 

 through, as by prostitutes, with various persons, it may altogether 

 decay. Habit also fixes it in us toward certain individuals : nothing 

 is so particularly displeasing as the notion of close personal contact 

 with those with whom we have long known in a respectful and distant 

 way. The fondness of the ancients and of modern Orientals for forms 



* To most of us it is even unpleasant to sit down in a chair still warm from occupancy 

 by another person's body. To many hand-shaking is disagreeable. 



