INSTINCT. 415 



pressions, may be the limit of their physical combativeness. 

 Such a feeling as this may, however, be aroused by a wide 

 range of objects. Inanimate things, combinations of color 

 and sound, bad bills of fare, may in persons who combine 

 fastidious taste with an irascible temperament produce 

 real ebullitions of rage. Though the female sex is often 

 said to have less pugnacity than the male, the difference 

 seems connected more with the extent of the motor con- 

 sequences of the impulse than with its frequency. Women 

 take offence and get angry, if anything, more easily than men, 

 but their anger is inhibited by fear and other principles of 

 iheir nature from expressing itself in blows. The hunting- 

 instinct proper seems to be decidedly weaker in them than 

 in men. The latter instinct is easily restricted by habit to 

 certain objects, which become legitimate ' game,' while 

 other things are spared. If the hunting-instinct be not ex- 

 ercised at all, it ma}- even entirely die out, and a man may 

 enjoy letting a wild creature live, even though he might easily 

 Mil it. Such a type is now becoming frequent ; but there 

 is no doubt that in the ej'es of a child of nature such a 

 personage would seem a sort of moral monster. 



Fear is a reaction aroused by the same objects that 

 arouse ferocity. The antagonism of the two is an interest- 

 ing study in instinctive dynamics. We both fear, and wish 

 to kill, anything that may kill us ; and the question which 

 of the two impulses we shall follow is usually decided by 

 some one of those collateral circumstances of the particular 

 case, to be moved by which is the mark of superior mental 

 natures. Of course this introduces uncertainty into the 

 reaction ; but it is an uncertainty found in the higher 

 brutes as well as in men, and ought not to be taken as 

 proof that we are less instinctive than they. Fear has 

 bodily expressions of an extremely energetic kind, and 

 stands, beside lust and anger, as one of the three most ex- 

 citing emotions of which our nature is susceptible. The 

 progress from brute to man is characterized by nothing so 

 much as by the decrease in frequency of proper occasions 

 for fear. In civilized life, in particular, it has at last be- 

 come possible for large numbers of people to pass from the 

 cradle to the grave without ever having had a pang of genu- 



