426 psrCHOLOOY. 



Kleptomaniacs often promptly restore, or permit to be re- 

 stored, what they have taken; so the impulse need not be 

 to keep, but only to take. But elsewhere hoarding com- 

 plicates the result. A gentleman, with whose case I am 

 acquainted, was discovered, after his death, to have a hoard 

 in his barn of all sorts of articles, mainly of a trumpery 

 sort, but including pieces of silver which he had stolen 

 from his own dining-room, and utensils which he had stolen 

 from his own kitchen, and for which he had afterward 

 bought substitutes with his own money. 



Constructiveness is as genuine and irresistible an instinct 

 in man as in the bee or the beaver. Whatever things are 

 plastic to his hands, those things he must remodel into 

 shapes of his own, and the result of the remodelling, how- 

 ever useless it may be, gives him more pleasure than the 

 original thing. The mania of young children for breaking 

 and pulling apart whatever is given them is more often 

 the expression of a rudimentary constructive impulse than 

 of a destructive one. ' Blocks ' are the playthings of 

 which they are least apt to tire. Clothes, weapons, 

 tools, habitations, and works of art are the result of the 

 discoveries to which the plastic instinct leads, each individ- 

 ual starting where his forerunners left off, and tradition 

 preserving all that once is gained. Clothing, where not 

 necessitated by cold, is nothing but a sort of attempt to re- 

 model the human body itself — an attempt still better shown 

 in the various tattooings, tooth-filings, scarrings, and othei* 

 mutilations that are practised by savage tribes. As for 

 habitation, there can be no doubt that the instinct to seek 

 a sheltered nook, open only on one side, into which he may 

 retire and be safe, is in man quite as specific as the in- 

 stinct of birds to build a nest. It is not necessarily in the 

 shape of a shelter from wet and cold that the need comes 

 before him, but he feels less exposed and more at home 

 when not altogether uuinclosed than when lying all abroad. 

 Of course the utilitarian origin of this instinct is obvious. 

 But to stick to bare facts at present and not to trace 

 origins, we must admit that this instinct now exists, and 

 probably always has existed, since man was man. Habits 



