414 PSYCHOLOGY. 



iayed, the sudden freedom of rapine and of lust, the con- 

 tagion of a crowd, and the impulse to imitate and outdo, all 

 combine to swell the blind drunkenness of the killing-in- 

 stinct, and carry it to its extreme. No ! those who try to 

 account for this from above downwards, as if it resulted from 

 the consequences of the victory being rapidly inferred, and 

 from the agreeable sentiments associated with them in the 

 imagination, have missed the root of the matter. Our fe- 

 rocity is blind, and can only be explained from heloiv. Could 

 we trace it back through our line of descent, we should see 

 it taking more and more the form of a fatal reflex response, 

 and at the same time becoming more and more the pure 

 and direct emotion that it is.* 



In childhood it takes this form. The boys who pull 

 out grasshoppers' legs and butterflies' wings, and disem- 

 bowel everj^ frog they catch, have no thought at all about the 

 matter. The creatures tempt their hands to a fascinating 

 occupation, to which they have to yield. It is with them 

 as with the ' boy-fiend ' Jesse Pomeroy, who cut a little 

 girl's throat, 'just to see how she'd act.' The normal pro- 

 vocatives of the impulse are all living beasts, great and 

 small, toward which a contrary habit has not been formed 

 — all human beings in whom we perceive a certain intent 

 towards us, and a large number of human beings who offend 

 us peremptorily, either by their look, or gait, or by some' 

 circumstance in their lives which we dislike. Inhibited by 

 sympathy, and by reflection calling up impulses of an op- 

 posite kind, civilized men lose the habit of acting out their 

 pugnacious instincts in a perfectly natural way, and a pass- 

 ing feeling of anger, with its comparatively faint bodily ex- 



* " Bombonnel, having rolled with a panther to the border of a ravine, 

 gets his head awaj^ from tlie open mouth of the animal, and by a prodi- 

 gious effort rolls her into the abyss. He gets up, blinded, spitting a mass of 

 blood, not knowing exactly what the situation is. He thinks only of one 

 thing, that he shall probably die of his wounds, but that before dying he 

 must take vengeance on the panther. ' I didn't think of my pain,' he tells 

 us. ' Possessed entirely by the fury with which I was transported, I drew 

 my hunting-knife, and not understanding what had become of the beast, I 

 sought for her on every side in order to continue the struggle. It was iu 

 this plight that the Arabs found me when they arrived.'" (Quoted by 

 Guyan, La Morale sans Obligation, etc., p. 210.) 



