132 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP 



of languages, and in the emaciated remains of 

 abandoned beliefs and institutions. 



The hunting and fishing instinct of civilised 

 man is a vestigial instinct, normal in the savage, 

 but without either sense or decency among men 

 devoted to industrial pursuits. The savage hunts 

 and fishes because he is hungry, never for pastime; 

 civilised men and women do so because they are 

 too mechanical to assort their impulses. Civilised 

 man is a mongrel, a cross between a barbarian 

 and a god. His psychology is a compound of the 

 jungle and the sky. In their loftier moments, 

 many men are able to obscure the cruder facts of 

 their origin and to put into temporary operation 

 those more splendid processes of mind which 

 characterise their ideals. But even the most civil- 

 ised are forever haunted by the returning ghosts 

 of departed propensities — propensities which grew 

 up in ages of hate, which are now out-of-date, but 

 which in the trying tedium of daily life come 

 back and usurp the high places in human nature. 

 Revenge, hate, cruelty, pugnacity, selfishness, 

 vanity, and the like, are all more or less vestigial 

 among men who have entered seriously on the 

 life of altruism. Like the vermiform appendix 

 and the human tail, these old obsolete parts of the 

 human mind are destined, in the ripening of the 

 ages, to waste away and disappear through disuse. 



The practice of the dog of turning round two or 

 three times before lying down is in response to an 

 instinct which was no doubt beneficial to it in its 

 wild life, when it was wont to make its bed in the 



