INSTINCT. 435 



there.* It seems to be there iu all cases; and theu to be 

 particularly amenable to outside influences, the child hav- 

 ing his own degree of squeamishuess about what he shall 

 touch or eat, and later being either hardened or made more 

 fastidious still bj the habits he is forced to acquire and the 

 examples among which he lives. 



Examples get their hold on him in this way, that a partic- 

 ularly evil-smelling or catarrhal or lousy comrade is rather 

 offensive to him, and that he sees the odiousness in another 

 of an amount of dirt to which he would have no sponta- 

 neous objection if it were on his own skin. That ive dislike 

 in others things which we tolerate in ourselves is a law of our 

 aesthetic nature about which there can be no doubt. But 

 as soon as generalization and reflection step in, this judging 

 of others leads to a new Avay of regarding ourselves. " Who 

 taught you politeness ? The impolite," is, I believe, a 

 Chinese proverb. The concept, ' dirty fellow,' which we 

 have formed, becomes one under which we personally 

 shrink from being classed; and so we 'wash up,' and set 

 ourselves right, at moments when our social self-conscious- 

 ness is awakened, in a manner toward Avhich no strictly in- 

 stinctive native prompting exists. But the standard of 

 cleanliness attained in this way is not likely to go beyond 

 the mutual tolerance for one another of the members of the 

 tribe, and hence may comport a good deal of actual filth. 



Modesty, Shame. Whether there be an instinctive impulse 

 to hide certain parts of the body and certain acts is perhaps 

 even more open to doubt than whether there be an instinct 

 of cleanliness. Anthropologists have denied it, and in the 

 utter shamelessness of infancy and of many savage tribes 

 liave seemed to find a good basis for their views. It must, 

 however, be remembered that infancy proves nothing, and 

 that, as far as sexual modesty goes, the sexual impulse itself 

 works directly against it at times of excitement, and with 

 reference to certain people; and that habits of immodesty 



* The insane symptom called "mysophobia," or dread of foulness, 

 which leads a patient to wash his hands perhaps a hundred times a day, 

 hardly seems explicable without supposing a primitive impulse to clean 

 one's self of which it is, as it were, the convulsive exaggeration. 



