324 Organic Nature s Riddle 



the products of excretion are removed from the body. The 

 second class of instincts, those which ensure the continuance 

 of the race, show themselves of course, only much later. 

 Yet, long before the little girl can represent to herself 

 future tributes to her charms, she seeks to decorate her 

 tiny body with the arts of infant coquetry. Still less does 

 she look forward to the pains and pleasures of maternity 

 when she begins to caress and chastise, to soothe and cherish, 

 her first doll, and fondly presses it to that region whence 

 her future offspring will draw its nourishment. Again, when 

 the lapse of a few years having made her a young woman 

 and the boy a youth, they first feel the influence of love, 

 however ignorant they may be of the physiology of their 

 race, they will none the less, circumstances permitting, be 

 surely impelled towards the performance of very definite 

 actions. In the more refined individuals of the highest 

 races of mankind, the material, merely animal, consum- 

 mation of sexual love is most certainly far from being the 

 one great end distinctly looked forward to by each pair 

 of lovers. Yet every incident of affectionate intercourse, 

 every tender glance, every contact of hand or lip, infal- 

 libly leads on towards the one useful end, indispensable to 

 the race, which nature has in view. Such actions fully merit 

 to be called 'instinctive.' Indeed the act of generation is 

 ministered to in nature by the most manifold, imperious, 

 general, and inexplicable of all the instincts, and its in- 

 stinctive character is the most strongly marked of aU. It 

 has emphatically for its origin a rigorously determined and 

 precise want, partly painful, partly pleasurable — a mixture 

 of a feeling of privation with a sense of power. Its end is 

 unknown to the agent, or if known is disregarded, and in 

 almost aU animals it demands the concurrent and reciprocal 

 action of two diverse organisms. If any one would deny that 

 it is instinctive in man, I would advise him to study the sad 



