5y8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pride prevents an nnderstanding, and the rupture comes." Just 

 as the malevolent feelings may arise de novo, so it is with the 

 benevolent ones. Nordau shows how the no ndescr ipt state of 

 being " in love " often arises. Some incident between John and 

 Mary leads one of them — we will say John — to think mistakenly 

 that Mary has been attracted to him. Pleased with the fact, he 

 reciprocates. Mary, altogether unconscious of the reciprocal na- 

 ture of John's attention, finds pleasure in it, and in her turn recip- 

 rocates. Mutual reciprocity then follows. 



In irritable persons we find the morbid sense of injury coupled 

 with resentment. Quickly interpreting anything disagreeable to 

 them as an affront by another, their first impulse is to resent it, 

 which they do more or less violently, according to circumstances, 

 their second thought often recognizing the irrational nature of the 

 outbreak. This suggests the feral instinct. Examples are com- 

 mon in the lower animals, while in pain attacking those about 

 them as if they were the cause of it. No doubt this resentment 

 is a survival from evolutionary ancestry. It has probably served 

 a necessary purpose in the conservation of animal life by causing 

 the animal to attack what may, in the jealousy of self-preservation 

 and its feeble discrimination, even be suspected of being inimical 

 to its welfare. Blind and unjust, perhaps, but Nature hesitates 

 at no apparent injustice to accomplish this. When we go higher, 

 to the tribal relation of man, we find the same blind resentment. 

 The Australian aborigines have no conception of death, except as 

 vaguely associated with homicidal causes, and when a member of 

 a tribe dies a most natural death a member of a hostile tribe is 

 killed to avenge the supposed murder. The. Africans, too, read 

 homicidal forces into natural deaths. In civilized social rela- 

 tions it appears again in the very popular and usually irrational 

 demand for a scapegoat when matters go wrong. The idea of 

 religious sacrifice, too, is a practice by which the anthropomorphic 

 God is credited with being aggrieved by human conduct and of 

 wishing to be appeased therefor. Though the exercise of this 

 indiscriminate resentment was probably greater and more neces- 

 sary in the pre-social stage of human evolution, there is still ground 

 for its activity to-day in the struggle for existence which has but 

 changed its arena. Under a veneer of amity, laudable enough, 

 there are till the suspicion and resentment of the tribal relation, 

 as we may often see unveiled in a posse of boys, and that this 

 resentment is yet of the blind kind, we still have proof if we have 

 seen an enlightened man deliberately kick a harmless chair because 

 he stumbled on it in the dark. 



Phylogenetically, then, we see this morbid " sense of injury " 



