INSTINCT. 423 



tliougli a collection of any given thing — like postage-stamps 

 — need not be begun by any given person, yet the chances 

 are that if accidentally it he begun by a person with the col- 

 lecting instinct, it will probably be continued. The chief 

 interest of the objects, in the collector's eyes, is that they 

 are a collection, and that they are his. Rivalry, to be sure, 

 inflames this, as it does every other passion, yet the objects 

 of a collector's mania need not be necessarily such as are 

 generally in demand. Boys wall collect anything that they 

 see another boy collect, from pieces of chalk and peach-pits 

 up to books and photographs. Out of a hundred students 

 whom I questioned, only four or five had never collected 

 anything.* 



The associationist psychology denies that there is any 

 blind primitive instinct to appropriate, and would explain all 

 acquisitiveness, in the first instance, as a desire to secure the 

 * pleasures ' which the objects possessed may yield ; and, sec- 

 ondly, as the association of the idea of pleasantness with the 

 holding of the thing, even though the pleasure originally got 

 by it was only gained through its expense or destruction. 

 Thus the miser is shown to us as one who has transferred 

 to the gold by which he may buy the goods of this life all 

 the emotions which the goods themselves would yield ; and 

 who thereafter loves the gold for its own sake, preferring 

 the means of j^leasure to the pleasure itself. There can be 

 little doubt that much of this analysis a broader view of 

 the facts would have dispelled. ' The miser ' is an abstrac- 

 tion. There are all kinds of misers. The common sort, 

 the excessively niggardly man, simply exhibits the psycho- 

 logical law that the potential has often a far greater influ- 

 ence over our mind than the actual. A man will not marry 

 now, because to do so puts an end to his indefinite potenti- 

 alities of choice of a partner. He prefers the latter. He 

 will not use open fires or wear his good clothes, because the 

 day may come when he will have to use the furnace or 

 dress in a worn-out coat, ' and then where will he be ? * 



* In ' The Nation ' for September 3, 1886, President G. S. Hall has 

 given some account of a statistical research on Boston .'chool-boys, by Miss 

 Wiltse, from which it appears that only nineteen out of two hundred and 

 twenty-nine had made no collections. 



