INSTINCT. 437 



geneous for iis to be sure that everywhere reserve must in- 

 spire some respect, aud that persons who suffer every liberty 

 are persons whom others disregard. Not to be like such 

 people, tlien, would be one of the first resolutions sug- 

 gested by social self-consciousness to a child of nature just 

 emerging from the unreflective state. And the resolution 

 would probably acquire effective pungency for the first 

 time when the social self -consciousness was sharjiened into 

 a real fit of shyness by some person being present whom it 

 was important not to disgust or displease. Public opinion 

 would of course go on to build its positive precepts upon 

 this germ ; and, through a variety of examples and experi- 

 ences, the ritual of modesty would grow, until it reached 

 the New England pitch of sensitiveness and range, making 

 us say stomach instead of belly, limb instead of leg, retire 

 instead of go to bed, and forbidding us to call a female dog 

 by name. 



At bottom this amounts to the admission that, though 

 in some shape or other a natural and inevitable feature of 

 human life, modesty need not necessarily be an instinct in 

 the pure and simple excito-motor sense of the term. 



Love. Of all propensities, the sexual impulses bear on 

 their face the most obvious signs of being instinctive, in 

 the sense of blind, automatic, and untaught. The teleology 

 they contain is often at variance with the wishes of the in- 

 di\'iduals concerned ; and the actions are performed for no 

 assignable reason but because Nature urges just that way. 

 Here, if ever, then, we ought to find those characters of 

 fatality, infallibility, and uuiformity, which, we are told, 

 make of actions done from instinct a class so utterly apart. 

 But is this so ? The facts are just the reverse : the sexual 

 instinct is particularly liable to be checked and modified 

 by slight differences in the individual stimulus, by the 

 inward condition of the agent himself, by habits once ac- 

 quired, and by the antagonism of contrary impulses operat- 

 ing on the mind. One cf these is the ordinary shyness 

 recently described ; another is what might be called the 

 anti-sexual instinct, the instinct of personal isolation, the 

 actual repulsiveness to us of the idea of intimate contact 



