the family would be impossible. Our children ought to be early taught by their parents its sacred significance and its value. They ought not to be left to learn about it from often immoral and always ignorant companions. They ought not to be punished for falling into a habit of self-indulgence against which they have never been warned. This strange, mysterious desire, which always accompanies health and vigor, and which prompts both to the purest love and the most bestial excesses, cannot be eradicated, for God has planted it in man; it should be early directed by the child's natural guardian and teacher. As with the individual, so with society; the social evils which grow out of the sexual appetite are various and deadly. They are often fostered directly by unscrupulous men for purposes of gain, from motives of avarice. They can be checked somewhat by law; but so long as appetite exists, so long the sins of appetite will continue to poison society; and the only real and radical remedy is that education and that spiritual development which brings the appetites themselves into subordination to the law of God as revealed to and written in the higher nature. Law can protect society from these evils in some measure; but no law can eradicate them. Nothing can do that but the subjection of the appetite and the supremacy of the spirit.

3. Next to the appetites and passions come the impulses of combativeness and destructiveness. The former were necessary to the support of life; these are necessary to its protection. Man is surrounded by enemies; enemies to his existence and to his progress; enemies to his physical and to his spiritual well-being. He needs, therefore, to be endowed with certain powers of combativeness and destructiveness; powers which enable him to stand up strongly, contend bravely, and destroy utterly. The exercise of these faculties of combativeness and destructiveness is commanded also to our first parents in the Garden in the law, "Subdue it [the

earth] and have dominion." This man could not do unless he were fitted to be a combatant; without both the powers and the instinct of combat, he could not conquer nature, subdue the wilderness, battle with the wild beasts, and so tame the world to be his dwelling-place. For this he must have the moral as well as the material force; the impulse as well as the nerve and the muscle. The possession of these qualities give force, energy, courage, pluck, push. They are 'seen in every pioneer, in every great captain, in every man of large success. Without this power Luther could never have burned the Pope's bull in the court-yard at Wittenberg; nor could Paul have faced the mob from the stairs of the Tower of Antonia; nor could Christ have driven the traders from the temple courts. It is this which made him the Lion of

the tribe of Judah. A single individual may be an estimable member of society without it; for others about him, stronger and more courageous than himself, will do his battling for him, and he will compensate by other and gentler services. But the human race could not survive its loss. It would be overborne and perish from its own weakness and imbecility. This gives power of punishment to all governments. It is at the root of every form of wrath and indignation. It enables the parent to punish his child; the government to punish crime. It breaks out in lynch law against the desperado. It may become the instrument of any other faculty. Serving acquisitiveness, it becomes predatory, and makes its possessor a robber and a plunderer; serving conscience, it becomes an honorable courage, and makes its possessor a guardian of the interests of his home or his state from the robber or the anarchist. The lack of it begets irresolution, effeminacy, weakness, cowardice; its excess, or ill-direction, or ill-control, begets quarrelsomeness, a disputatious spirit, the gladiator, whether with muscle or brain, cruelty, rapine, murder. It is indispensable to the existence of mankind, but it is also one of the

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A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE.

prolific sources of all that is inhuman in history and in life.*

*

4. Akin in its object, but contrasted by its nature with combativeness and destructiveness, is cautiousness. The one protects by fight, the other by flight. The one is the lion in man, the other is the hare. The commingling of the two constitutes true courage; for there is no true courage without a perception of danger and a desire to avoid it. Caution is one of the restraining impulses, holding men back from too sudden, too aggressive, and too heedless action. It compels them to pause, to reflect, to consider. It is a rein; combativeness and destructiveness are spurs. It is strongest in women; is seen in its worst aspects in effeminate men. It is the cause of all cowardice; leads to concealments; is manifested in ordinary social life in the sensitive disposition of the timid; often underlies a vacillating disposition; is the most common cause of deception and falsehood; and should be counteracted always by hope, courage, conscience, love; almost never by severe punishment. It is invaluable as a restraining and counteracting faculty; when it becomes the dominant motive, it is fatal to forcefulness and efficiency of character.

5. Among the impulses whose object is a preservation of existence must also be put the love of offspring. So much has been said and written about parental love, about mothers' love especially, that it may seem to the reader doubtful whether this impulse belongs here among the lower animal impulses. But a moment's reflection will convince him that the love of offspring is in its lowest forms a purely animal instinct; seen in the cat's care for her kitten, the hen's for her chickens, the cow's for her calf in every farm-yard; seen also, alas! as a mere blind semi-sensual instinct, in many a

*The phrenologist generally distinguishes between combativeness and destructiveness. But they are so nearly akin, that I think any discrimination between them is rather confusing than helpful in analysis.

home, where the father or mother cannot bear to inflict pain, or thwart a desire, or permit a disappointment, or allow a burden, and so the child grows up, coddled and tended, to be weak and wayward and willful, and often worse. This parental instinct, guided and inspired by the higher nature, is the child's guardian from present evil, and guide into future manhood; but unguided and uninspired, it protects only from pain, which is God's method of discipline, and seeking only happiness, guides often into destruction and misery. It is, too, quite evident that it is necessary for the protection of existence; for the infant, whether of man or animal, is rarely able at first to protect himself; the higher his rank in the scale of being the greater the necessity for protection; and if there were no parental instinct, if there was nothing but a general and distributed sentiment of pity, he would certainly suffer greatly, and would generally die for want of the power in himself of self-protection. The parental instinct endows him with all the faculties and powers of his parent, especially with those of his mother-for in both brutes and men this instinct is almost invariably the strongest in the female-until his own powers have attained sufficient growth to make him able to protect himself.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL IMPULSES.

1. AT the foundation of the social organization in all its various manifestations is the social instinct. The phrenologists call it adhesiveness. Some animals are gregarious, others are solitary. Man is gregarious. The recluse is an exception. There is but one Thoreau. Solitary imprisonment is the most dreaded of all penalties. Men are impelled to associate together in political, industrial, and social enterprises. Their intercourse in these associations is regulated in a large measure by the spiritual impulses, of which we shall have something to say in the next chapter. But the association itself is a necessity of human nature irrespective of the ulterior advantages to be gained from it.

Bain attempts, but not very successfully, to account for the social instinct by the fact that it is a means to an end. We associate, according to him, to gratify our benevolent impulses; to get aid from others in our life and its undertakings; to gratify our love of power or of applause, and the like. These most certainly intensify the social instinct; but the social instinct exists independent of them. A man may be very social and yet supremely selfish; he may dread isolation and yet be cynical. Sociality is a primary fact of human nature. There is a molecular attraction which draws men together. Humanity instinctively coalesces as drops of water in a stream.

2. Doubtless one of the chief promoters and regulators of this social instinct is approbativeness, or the love of praise. Mr. Darwin regards it, I think wholly without good ground, as constituting the basis of conscience. But unquestionably