424 PSYCHOLOGY. 



For him, better the actual evil than the fear of it ; and so 

 it is with the common lot of misers. Better to live poor 

 now, with the poiver of living rich, than to live rich at the 

 risk of losing the power. These men value their gold, not 

 for its own sake, but for its ]30wers. Demonetize it, and see 

 how quickly they will get rid of it ! The associationist the- 

 ory is, as regards them, entirely at fault : they care noth- 

 ing for the gold in se. 



With other misers there combines itself with this pref- 

 erence of the power over the act the far more instinctive 

 element of the simple collecting propensity. Every one 

 collects money, and when a man of petty ways is smitten 

 with the collecting mania for this object he necessarily be- 

 comes a miser. Here again the associationist psychology 

 is wholly at fault. The hoarding instinct prevails widely 

 among animals as well as among men. Professor Silliman 

 has thus described one of the hoards of the California 

 wood-rat, made in an empty stove of an unoccupied house : 



" I found the outside to be composed entirely of spikes, all laid 

 with symmetry, so as to pi'eseut the points of the nails outward. In the 

 centre of this mass was the nest, composed of finely-divided fibres ot 

 hemp-packing. Interlaced with the spikes were the following : about 

 two dozen knives, forks, and spoons ; all the butcher's knives, three 

 in number ; a large carving-knife, fork, and steel ; several large plugs 

 of tobacco, ... an old purse containing some silver, matches, and 

 tobacco ; nearly all the small tools from the tool-closets, with several 

 large augers, ... all of which must have been transported some dis- 

 tance, as they were originally stored in different parts of the house. . . . 

 The outside casing of a silver watch was disposed of in one part of 

 the pile, the glass of the same watch in another, and the works 

 in still another."* 



In every lunatic asylum we find the collecting instinct 

 developing itself in an equally absurd way. Certain pa- 

 tients will spend all their time picking pins from the 

 floor and hoarding them. Others collect bits of thread, 

 buttons, or rags, and prize them exceedingly. Now, 'the 

 Miser ' par excellence of the popular imagination and of 

 melodrama, the monster of squalor and misanthropy, is 

 simply one of these mentally deranged persons. His in- 

 tellect may in many matters be clear, but his instincts, 



* Quoted ia Lindsay, ' Mind in Lower Animals,' vol. ii. p. 151. 



