Heredity, Variation and Genius 25 



Mount would not fare well, no better perhaps 

 than it would now in civilized nations ; it could 

 not be a happy life and might not be a long one ; 

 and the strict adoption of the lofty principles of 

 that discourse by the tribe would be more likely 

 to lead to its extinction than to its continuance on 

 earth. How clean and soon the moral gains of 

 culture may be put off by civilized peoples is 

 shown by the hideous explosion of the brutal 

 instincts, self-conservative, predatory, and sexual, 

 when the customary restraints are temporarily 

 swept away by panic or by passion. Neither 

 reason nor moral sense makes the least appreci- 

 able appeal to the brute inside the man the func- 

 tion of whose finest mental superstructure is thus 

 temporarily effaced, as happens so easily when 

 the ambient social medium is removed and the 

 inflamed basic passions explode violently. For 

 the time being he is as naked and not ashamed as 

 the infant on which the constantly applied and 

 steadily moulding influences of the social body 

 into which it is born have not yet put on a fitting 



she was immensely comforted. Their mental mechanisms, like 

 the mechanisms of animal instincts, are now so infixed in 

 structure that they pass unchanged from generation to genera- 

 tion ; bespeak indeed the very beginnings of social life in which 

 they had their birth ; whereas the altruistic feelings are a later 

 and more tender growth under culture. The various laws 

 which have been found necessary in every civilized country to 

 curb individual propensities to do wrong are just a complicated 

 machinery to transform the natural into the social man. 



