CHAPTER VI

INSTINCT AND RELAXATION

Some one has said that the more we know about the past the less we respect it. This aphorism may be true with certain social conventionalities and pretensions, but it is viciously false with regard to the deepest laws of life. Nature is too unitary and continuous to permit it to be true. The present is born of the past and the past abides in the present, and to understand the present we must appreciate the past. That is the excuse of the two foregoing chapters, which, although they may be but rough sketches, surely emphasize the fact that the child is the product of a most remote and remarkable antiquity.

How far back we trace this pedigree is a matter of taste. Surely we are descended from the neolithic Europeans who lived over a score of millenniums ago, and these in turn were descended from paleolithic ancestors who chipped rough stone implements for some three hundred thousand years. And if we add the vague eolithic period, we may say that the span of man's distinctly human sojourn on this earth measures a half million years. Some would multiply this by two, and if we include the postulated Miocene precursor of man, we shall have to multiply by five or six, or even more. The zoologist, of course, does not stop even here. He tries to reconstruct the whole tree of life, assigning to the different branches and heights of the main stem a definite geological age. The tracks of worms are found in rocks which we know are scores of millions of years old. The

evolutionist is sure of our genetic relationship with these same Pre-Cambrian worms. The fish is certainly a zoological descendant of the aquatic worm. A student of Haeckel has calculated that the number of generations which lie between the lowest fish and man is fifty millions. To be unconscious of this tremendous range of prehuman and human existence is never to have realized the comprehensiveness compacted in the present.

Comparative anatomy has worked out with surprising success, organ for organ, our minute and gross structural similarity to the lower animals. The psychologist and teacher are, however, chiefly interested in the comparative facts which relate to consciousness and behavior. There is psychic heredity as well as physical heredity. In spite of the fact that dog, horse, sheep, goat, cow, and pig have been domesticated since primitive neolithic times, they still betray tendencies and modes of behavior which belong peculiarly to their feral state. Dr. Louis Robinson has written a charming book on the wild traits of the domesticated animals, which man has tamed but not completely transformed.

The dog before he lies down to sleep, it may be on a parlor carpet, turns about in an idiotic circle, as though he were still a Miocene wolf and had to trample down a bed of grass and weeds. The western horse bucks, shakes and puts down his head as though the saddle on his back were really a clutching panther and had to be shaken off. The cow secretes her newborn calf in the tall growth of meadow, as though she were still living in the age of fear. The independence, sure-footedness, caution, obstinacy, and unshakable nerves of the donkey and goat date back to an ancient, self-reliant life in the mountains. The angry ewe stamps her feet when approached by a dog, who looks much like a wolf to her, and this is "a remnant of an old killing activity."

The greediness, grunt, squeal, keen scent, and expert snakedestruction powers of the pig are reminiscent of the gregarious wild-boar days in the lowlands.

There are decided differences in the mentality and attitudes of dog and cat. The tribe of tigers belongs to the solitary animals who depend for survival upon individual cunning, ferocity, and prowess. Inasmuch as the house cat traces her lineage to the tiger family, Robinson has boldly asserted that she lacks the capacities for companionship so well developed in the dog, who for centuries lived the social life of the pack and there learned the rudiments of helpfulness, loyalty, and sensitiveness. The cat, to be sure, loves to rub against you, and to nestle in your arms, which serve for a snug crotch. But perhaps she regards you in her dim way as nothing but a specially comfortable peripatetic tree. The dog, however, regards the household as he did the old wolf pack, and the master as the benevolent leader of the pack; hence all the faithfulness, sympathy, and affection which have made him the favorite of pets. A dog cannot help but be cynomorphic in his mentality and attitude. To interpret even his comparatively simple psychology we must take account of the past, for the wild survives in the tame and the past in the present.

Can it be otherwise with the child? Childhood is something more than a simple, undifferentiated period of plasticity or imperfection. If the modern facts of heredity point. to anything, it is that childhood is charged with the propensities of the past. And these propensities all have a history and significance, which the following survey of the human instincts will try to suggest.

Instincts are inborn propensities or modes of behavior common to the species. They are as innate and characteristic as peculiarities of structure. They belong to the creature

as much as his claws or his snout, and are as essential for his survival; for structure and function are inseparable, and instincts furnish the impulses which impel the creature to use his organs for self and species perpetuation.

There is no sudden or dramatic appearance of instinct in the animal kingdom, no satisfactory theory of the method of its origin. Even plants have definite modes of behavior in the presence of light, gravity, moisture, etc., called tropisms. These very elementary adjustments with reference to stimuli are essentially physicochemical in nature, according to Loeb, who thinks that tropisms explain many reactions in animals as well as in plants. These tropisms, or their equivalent, stand for a type of behavior more primitive than instinct. With the evolution of a nervous system definite instincts associated with distinct cravings finally are differentiated to displace, or possibly supplement, the tropisms. At first the instincts are simple, few, and intermittent. With advance in the animal scale they multiply, and man has a larger complement than any of his forebears, for the simple reason that he cannot escape his accumulated inheritance. A rough classification of his many instincts distributes them into four or five groups.

I. The self-preservative instincts. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and the most fundamental instincts are those which most directly enforce this law. Hunger and thirst and the pant for breath are the deepest of all cravings, but they are not the sole expression of the primordial food quest. Out of the securing and defending of food supplies grew a more generalized desire to have and to hold, now called the proprietary instinct. This is one of the most protean impulses, and colors in ways innumerable both child and adult behavior. It would almost seem that instinct, like matter, is imperishable, and that man retains all the past

momentum of this impulse to gain something, assimilate it, and make it his own. This instinct used to go out to food alone; now it goes out to all sorts of things, material and immaterial.

A special form of the proprietary instinct is hoarding, and closely related to this is collecting, an instinct which seizes upon almost every boy or girl, and never altogether dies. out. It begins before the kindergarten age with the collection of knickknacks, stones, leaves, etc., and mounts high about the age of ten. The interest in collection burns so strong and is often so spontaneous that it can only be accounted for by an intensity enjoyed in earlier racial development. Hunting and migrating, both in animals and in primitive man, are obviously associated with the feeding instinct. To this day truancy seems to vary with the nutrition of the body, and with the season of the year. And the peculiar zest with which a boy uses a bow and arrow, gun or fishing rod, the consuming interest with which he stalks. his prey, suggest the survival of ancestral life values.

Locomotion is as fundamental as feeding itself, and, of course, closely related to it. The manner in which the powers of locomotion develop in the child strongly indicates that the race did not always walk erect. The newborn babe can clasp a stick with strength enough in hands and arms to suspend its whole weight for several moments. In arboreal life a babe must cling to the climbing mother. Hands and arms, therefore, precede the development of the legs. All hand-grasping is at first clumsy, but in about three months a baby can oppose the thumb to the finger, a power which, by the way, the race did not always have. Before the end of the first year the child usually shows instinctive right-handedness. There are distinguishable stages in the assumption of the erect posture. First the head is held up;