The will of an animal, therefore, is inseparable from the instincts to which either his racial memory or his bodily parts give rise. For he will do whatever his most powerful instinct, for the time being, bids him do.
Let us now turn to man. With Reibmayr let me posit the three fundamental instincts of man as (1) the Self-preservative Instinct, (2) the Reproductive Instinct, (3) the Social Instinct.
According to his nature, man has one of these instincts stronger or weaker than the other two, and this strength or weakness determines his character, his choice of paths in life and of conduct in life.
Imagine the Self-preservative Instinct superior in power to the other two, and, like all ambitious men bent only on self-aggrandisement, he will scout both woman and society at all points where either of these threatens to make him pay too heavy a toll. Suppose that his Reproductive Instinct is the most powerful—as was the case with Mark Antony—and he will be ready to sacrifice society and himself for the woman he loves. If his Social Instinct leads him—as it lead Napoleon, Disraeli, Charles I, Strafford, Colbert and others, he will make woman and self subordinate to society’s claims upon his energies.
His will—that is to say the guiding power directing his conduct—is thus only the popular term for “leading instinct.”
In men of the Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche, St. Francis of Assisi, John the Baptist type, the social instinct was so strong that it completely mastered and sacrificed the other two instincts. Their reproductive instinct was suppressed and snubbed, and women were scouted by them, while they considered their self-preservative instinct only in so far as it assisted them in continuing and prolonging the exercise of their social instinct. The will in these men resided in their leading social instinct. It was that which determined their conduct.
In the coward, the anarchist, the deserter, the ambitious upstart bent only on self-aggrandisement and security, in the unscrupulous plutocrat, the self-preservative instinct is so strong that woman and society are sacrificed or ignored, whenever any emergency or dilemma occurs in which it becomes necessary to sacrifice them for the sake of self-preservation. Such men’s wills reside entirely in the thought of their own survival and security, and are determined exclusively by the self-preservative instinct.
If, now, we ask what is Woman’s will, by what instinct is it determined?—we are in a position to say at once: Woman’s will, owing to the very correlation of her bodily parts and the important place the organs and business of Life’s multiplication hold in her constitution, is at least likely to have a strong bias or predisposition in favour of being determined by her reproductive instinct. For the latter is clearly very strongly implanted in her. The two sources from which alone instinct can arise, and from which this particular instinct can draw its strength, are present within her; they are undeniably her idiosyncracy, and they are: (1) Racial memory (her women ancestors for millions of generations, with the same organs as she possesses, having performed all the functions of conception, parturition, and the rearing of children more or less successfully, otherwise she herself would not be there) and (2) the correlation of bodily parts (her body having the full equipment for reproduction, which must crave the exercise of its functions and suggest its use, if that equipment be healthy and well-formed).
You may suggest that the same holds good of man. As a matter of fact, it does not. Because in man there is some doubt, some uncertainty as to the bias, as to the prejudice, suggested by his bodily parts. If in man the organs concerned with Life’s multiplication held the same predominant place as they do in woman, the same would certainly hold good of him. But it is obvious that this is not the case. The case is rather the reverse.
It is because of woman’s elaborate and extensive equipment precisely for the business of Life’s multiplication, that we are justified in suspecting that her will is likely to reside in this equipment, or rather in the instinct that springs and takes its strength from it. We are justified in suspecting this, on the same principle as that which justifies us in suspecting that the will of the mole is determined by its forelegs and general correlation of bodily parts.