Social conditions can thus be modified so as to give satisfaction to a larger proportion of natural desires. On the other hand, civilization in the twentieth century remains so divergent from the mode of life to which man's inborn nature adapts him that the thwarting of instincts becomes inevitable. Impulses, in the first place, arise capriciously, and one of the conditions of our highly organized life is regularity and canalization of action. Our businesses and professions cannot be conducted on the spontaneous promptings of instinct. The engineer, the factory worker, the business man, cannot allow themselves to follow out whatever casual desire occurs to them whenever it occurs. Stability and regularity of procedure, demanded in most professions, are incompatible with random impulsive behavior. To facilitate the effectiveness of certain industries, for example, it may be necessary to check impulses that commonly receive adequate satisfaction. Thus it may be essential to enforce silence, as in the case of telephone operators or motormen, simply because of the demands of the industry, not because there is anything intrinsically deserving of repression in the impulse to talk.
Again, the mere fact that a man lives in a group subjects him to a thousand restraints and restrictions of public opinion and law. A child may come to restrain his curiosity when he finds it condemned as inquisitiveness. We cannot, when we will, vent our pugnacity on those who have provoked it; we cannot be ruthlessly self-assertive in a group; or gratify our native acquisitiveness by appropriating anything and everything within our reach.
But because there are all these social forces making for the repression of instincts, it does not mean that these latter therefore disappear. If any one of them is unduly repressed, it does not simply vanish as a driving force in human behavior. It will make its enduring presence felt in roundabout ways, or in sudden extreme and violent outbursts. Or, if it cannot find even such sporadic or fruitive fulfillments, "a balked disposition" will leave the individual with an uneasiness and irritation that may range from mere pique to serious forms of morbidity and hysteria. A man may for eight or ten hours be kept repeating the same operation at a machine in a factory. He may thereby repress those native desires for companionship and for variety of reaction which constitute his biological inheritance. But too often postponed satisfaction takes the violent form of lurid, over-exciting amusements and dissipation. The suppression of the sex instinct not infrequently results in a morbid pruriency in matters of sex, a distortion of all other interests and activities by a preoccupation with the frustrated sex motive. Assaults and lynchings, and the whole calendar of crimes of violence with which our criminal courts are crowded, are frequent evidence of the incompleteness with which man's strong primary instincts have been suppressed by the niceties of civilization. The phenomenal outburst of collective vivacity and exuberance which marked the reported signing of the armistice at the close of the Great War was a striking instance of those immense primitive energies which the control and discipline of civilization cannot altogether repress.
There has been, furthermore, a great deal of evidence adduced in recent years by students of abnormal psychology concerning the results of the frustration of native desires. When the individual is "balked" in respect to particular impulses or desires, these may take furtive and obscure fulfillments; they may play serious though obscure and unnoticed havoc with a man's whole mental life. Unfulfilled desires may give rise to various forms of "complex," distortions of thought, action, and emotion of which the individual himself may be unaware. They may make a man unduly sensitive, or fearful, or pugnacious. He may, for example, cover up a sense of mortification at failure by an unwarranted degree of bluster and brag. A particular baffling of desire may be compensated by a bitterness against the whole universe or by a melancholy of whose origin the victim may be quite unconscious. These maladjustments between an individual's desires and his satisfactions are certainly responsible for a considerable degree of that irritation and neurasthenia which are so frequently observable in normal individuals.[1]
[Footnote 1: While the evidence in this field has been taken largely from extremely pathological cases, the distortions and perversions of mental behavior, noticeable in such cases, are simply extreme forms of the type of distortion that takes place in the case of normal individuals whose desires are seriously frustrated. See the very clear statement on the subject of "repressions" and "conflicts" in R. B. Hart's Psychology of Insanity.]
The facts enumerated above should make it clear why it is difficult to modify, much less completely to overcome, these strong original drives to action. They serve to emphasize the fact that by control of instinctive responses is not meant their suppression. For just as instinctive tendencies are our basic instruments of action, so instinctive desires are our basic ingredients of happiness. Just as all we can do is limited by the mechanisms with which we are endowed, so what we want is ultimately determined by the native desires with which we are born. The control of action and of desire is justified in so far as such control will the more surely promote a harmonious satisfaction of all our desires. A society whose arrangements are such that instincts are, on the whole, being repressed rather than stimulated and satisfied, is frustrating happiness rather than promoting it. At the very least, a life whose natural impulses are not being fulfilled is a life of boredom. The ennui which is so often and so conspicuously associated with the routine and desolate "gayeties" of society, the listlessness of those bored with their work or their play, or both, are symptoms of social conditions where the native endowments of man are handicaps rather than assets, dead weights rather than motive forces. It means that society is working against rather than with the grain. Discontent, ranging from mere pique and irritability to overt violence, is the penalty that is likely to be paid by a society the majority of whose members are chronically prevented from satisfying their normal human desires. No one who has seen whole lives immeasurably brightened by the satisfaction of a suitable employment, or melancholy and irritability removed by companionship and stimulating surroundings, can fail to realize how important it is to happiness that human instincts be given generous opportunity for fulfillment.
One may say, indeed, that the evils of too complete repression of individual impulses are more than that they produce nervous strain, dissatisfaction, and, not infrequently, crime. Happiness, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, is a complete living-out of all a man's possibilities. It is most in evidence when people are, as we say, doing what they like to do. And people like to do that which they are prompted to do by the nature which is their inheritance. Freshness, originality, and spontaneity are perhaps particularly valued in our own civilization because of the multiple restraints of business and professional occupations. Even under the most perfect social arrangements there will always exist among men conflicts of desire. Their control over their environment will, of necessity, be imperfect, as will their mastery of their own passions and their clear adjustment to one another. That complete agreement between man's desires and the environment in which alone they can find their satisfaction remains at best an ideal. But it is an ideal which indicates clearly the function of control. This is obviously not to crush native desires, but to organize their harmonious fulfillment. Where men have an opportunity to utilize their native gifts they will be satisfied and interested; where native capacities and desires are continually balked, men will be discontented though well-regimented machines.
Habitual behavior. Except for purposes of analysis, life on the purely instinctive level may be said scarcely to exist in contemporary society, or for that matter, since the beginnings of recorded history. As has been already pointed out, while men are born with an even wider variety of tendencies to act than animals, these are much more plastic and modifiable, more susceptible of training, and much more in need of it than those of the sub-human forms. Even among animals under conditions of domestication, instinct tends largely to be replaced by habitual or acquired modes of behavior. The human being, born with a nervous system and a brain in extremely unformed and plastic condition, is so susceptible to every influence current in his environment that most of his actions within a few years after birth are, when they are not the result of deliberate reflection, secondary or habitual rather than genuinely instinctive. That is, few of the simplest actions of human beings are not in some degree modified by experience. They may appear just as automatic and immediate as if they were instinctive, and indeed they are, but they are learned ways rather than the unlearned ways man has as his possession at birth.
The mechanism of habit. The implications of habitual behavior can better be understood after a brief analysis of the mechanism of such action. An instinct has been defined as a tendency to act in a given way in response to a given stimulus. What happens when a stimulus prompts the organism to respond in a given way, is that some sensory nerve, whether of taste or touch or sound, sight, smell, or muscular sensitivity, receives a stimulus which passes through the spinal cord to a motor nerve through which some muscle is "innervated" and a response made. In the simplest type of reflex action, such as the winking of an eye in a blinding light, or the withdrawing of a hand from flame, such is the physiology of the process. But where an immediate adjustment cannot be made by an instinctive response, where satisfaction is not secured by the passage of a sensory stimulus to an immediate motor response, the nervous impulse is, as it were, deflected to the brain area, auditory, visual, or whatever it may be, which is associated with that particular type of sensation. The path to the brain area is far from simple; the nervous impulse, which might be compared to an electric current, must pass through many nerve junctions known as "synapses," at which points there is some not completely understood chemical resistance offered to the passage of the nerve current. On passing through the network of nerves in the brain area, the current passes back again through a complicated maze of connections to a motor nerve which insures a muscular response. The first time a stimulus passes through this network the resistance offered at the nerve junction or synapse is very high; at succeeding repetitions of the stimulus the resistance is reduced, the nerve current passes more rapidly and fluently over the paths it has already traveled, and the action resulting becomes as direct and automatic as if it were an original reflex action.[1]
[Footnote 1: See McDougall: Physiological Psychology.]