430 PSYCHOLOGY. 



is called scientific curiosity, and with metaphysical wonder, 

 the practical instinctive root has probably nothing to do. 

 The stimuli here are not objects, but ways of conceiving 

 ■objects; and tlie emotions and actions they give rise to are 

 to be classed, with many other aesthetic manifestations, sen- 

 sitive and motor, as incidental features of our mental life. 

 The philosophic brain responds to an inconsistency or a 

 gap in its knowledge, just as the musical brain responds to 

 ix discord in what it hears. At certain ages the seiisitiveness 

 to particular gaps and tlie 2)leasuro of resolving particidar 

 puzzles reach their maximum, and then it is that stores of 

 scientific knowledge are easiest and most naturally laid in. 

 But these effects may have had nothing to do with the uses 

 for which the brain was originally given ; and it is probably 

 only within a few centuries, since religious beliefs and 

 economic applications of science have played a prondnent 

 part in the conflicts of one race with another, that they may 

 have helped to 'select' for survival a particular type of 

 brain. I shall have to consider this matter of incidental 

 and supernumerary faculties in Chapter XXYIII. 



Sociability and Shyness. As a gregarious animal, man 

 is excited both by the absence and by the presence of his 

 kind. To be alone is one of the greatest of evils for him. 

 Solitary confinement is by many regarded as a mode of 

 torture too cruel and unnatural for civilized countries to 

 adopt. To one long pent up on a desert island, the sight 

 of a human footprint or a human form in the distance 

 would be the most tumultuously exciting of experiences. 

 In morbid states of nund, one of the commonest symptoms 

 is the fear of being alone. This fear may be assuaged by 

 the presence of a little child, or even of a baby. In a case 

 of hydrophobia known to the writer, the patient insisted 

 on keeping his room croicded Avitli neighbors all the while, 

 so intense was his fear of solitude. In a gregarious ani- 

 mal, the perception that he is alone excites him to vigorous 

 activity. Mr. Galton thus describes the behavior of the 

 South African cattle whom he had such good opportunities 

 for observing : 



" Although the ox has little affection for, or interest in, his fellows, 

 he cannot endure even a momentary separation from his herd. If he 



