To understand Woman, then, we must first of all think of her as a creature who is constantly being actuated by the readiness and desire her bodily equipment feels, to be used, to be made to function, to exercise its powers. But we must always remember that she is not aware of the nature of this actuating force, that it is always the unconscious motive of her actions. We know it must be so; we know it is so; but we also know that she does not know it.
All her will, all her conduct, all her crimes or great deeds—if she perpetrate any—must be ascribed to the actuating force of her bodily equipment; but she will always be aware only of other motives for her conduct, and her mind will invariably misinterpret the causes of it.
Let me go over the ground I have just covered, in a slightly different way, in order that I may be quite sure of being understood. All those who have already thoroughly grasped my point can skip this passage.
If we examine the relation of instinct to will, what do we find it to be.[19]
An instinct may be understood as a predisposition implanted in a living creature to act in a certain way prior to experience, or, as a bias in favour of a certain line of conduct before any knowledge of that line of conduct or its consequences has been brought clearly to the conscious mind by individual experiment.
An infant, for instance, has no experience of food and its relation to the body; it has no experience of anything; but it has a predisposition to suck, which is the outcome of its bodily condition and ancestral history at a certain period of its life; and, as far as its early months are concerned, a child may be said to have an indomitable will to be suckled or to suck—it will cry violently if this proclivity be not indulged; its tears and cries will immediately subside if it has its way.
How does instinct become implanted in a living creature? Instinct may have two origins: (1) A racial origin, by which I mean that it is the outcome of an ancestral habit, and constitutes a predisposition to perform certain actions in a certain way, because of the incalculable number of times that the ancestors in the same line of descent have performed them in that way. As an example of this, take the circling movements of the dog before he lies down. The movements have no purpose now, because the domestic dog no longer lives in tall grass; but it is reminiscent of his ancestors’ behaviour for ages, and in this sense may be called an instinctive action of racial memory. The dog’s will is bent on performing this unnecessary and now perfectly empty formality, simply because his ancestors performed it so often in his line of descent.
(2) A bodily origin, by which I mean that an instinct is the natural outcome of a certain correlation of organs, bodily parts or weapons, and the possession of which in itself is sufficient to suggest and to enforce a certain mode of conduct in their possessor. As an example of this take the butting or tossing proclivities of the goat and bull respectively, the clawing of the cat, the burrowing of the mole, etc. etc. All these activities are the outcome of the possession of certain organs or bodily parts, that insist upon being used, that cause the animal to feel ill-adapted and miserable if they cannot function.
What, then, is will?
All will is obviously the power of the instinct that determines conduct for the moment, for a given period, or, as in some cases, for a lifetime.