§ 55
Instinct in Humans Generally Inadequate or Misleading
Instinctive reactions are adequate responses only in natural environments before civilization has set in. The more complicated life of modern civilization renders purely instinctive reactions more out of date than a twenty-year-old model of an automobile.
Not only is mere instinct not a good guide in the egoistic-social activities, but in the erotic life it is almost worse than useless. This is so because modern life is so different from the prehistoric environment that humans are today unable to follow erotic instinct, or even, on account of traditional inhibitions, to get at it in its purity.
We live today in an environment so preponderantly egoistic-social that the majority of motives for any act are egoistic-social ones, and only a small fraction of them erotic. This makes it as difficult to follow erotic instincts as for a compass to point north, when a magnet is lying three inches to the east of it.
Instinct alone would naturally prompt a boy and a girl to dwell long over the preliminaries to the love episode. If left together and alone, they would take some time to reach an erotic acme, and would instinctively find that out last of all, as is so beautifully described in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and so delicately suggested in Paul and Virginia.
Not only has the social convention of the present day tended more and more to inhibit the introduction, prelude, first and second acts of the love drama but it has raised such a barrier against the third act as to give it an entirely disproportionate value in comparison with the others.