THE INSTINCT OF SURVIVAL 103 



gratified, man, like lower animals, has a powerful 

 incentive to search actively for nutriment and to 

 defend his real or fancied rights to it by active 

 hostility to competitors. A real advantage arising 

 from this enforced search for food is that the ef- 

 fort spent in getting it helps to maintain physical 

 vigor. So soon as man develops sufficient imagina- 

 tion to strive, not merely for his immediate needs, 

 but also to forestall his future ones, by accumulating 

 a food supply, whether by killing game or by cultivat- 

 ing the land, he becomes a capitalist. This intro- 

 duces an entirely new element into his life, and one 

 which operates not wholly to his advantage. To be 

 able to eat as much and as often as one wills and, as 

 in modern life, to have food so served as to over- 

 stimulate the palate, leads inevitably to excess in 

 food and to undue prominence of the pleasures of the 

 table in the general scheme of life. The effects of 

 gormandizing are seen at all ages from the period 

 of infancy, when the mother overfeeds her child in 

 the belief that the more abundant the food, the better 

 the development, to the strivings of senility to build 

 up the system by tempting the appetite. It is not 

 simple to define the physical evils that follow exces- 

 sive feeding mainly because, aside from obvious 

 derangements of digestion, these evils are partly 

 due to associated errors in living, such as excessive 

 work and undue emotional indulgence associated 

 with indoor life. But it is no exaggeration to say 

 that man suffers from this excess many ills that entail 



