In such a case sublimation occurs with the normal object of the instinct. But the elasticity of man’s mind permits of further complication; the instinct may be not only sublimated but attached to new objects. Through the cogs and spirals of the mind, the sexual instinct may find an outlet at higher levels, and contribute to the driving force of adventurous living, of art, or as we may see in many mystics—St. Teresa for example—of religious ecstasy.
It is as if a swift stream were falling into underground channels below the mill of our being, where it could churn and roar away to waste. But some of it is led off at a higher level, and we can learn to lead off still more; and we can make an installation of pipes whereby it can be taken up to the original level, and made to fall through new machines and do any work we may ask of it.
The mechanism of sublimation, however, deserves a few more words. Recent work in biology has shown that in low forms of animals and in early stages of high forms, the head-region is in a certain sense dominant to the rest, in that it forms first and independently; but that, once present, it exerts a formative influence upon the rest of the body, keeping the various organs in some way under control, making them different from what they would otherwise have been, and so moulding them to the part of a single and higher whole.
An extremely similar process is at work in sublimation. Ideas and ideals can be naturally dominant over others, or they can become dominant through becoming associated with primarily dominant ideas, or by receiving a larger share of attention. Attention, concentration, what you will, is one of the most remarkable mental functions. Not only can the metaphor of intense illumination of a particular field be justly used of it, but we may say that it seems to accelerate the flow of mental process through a particular channel, and so to draw into that channel the contents of other channels in connection with it, just as a rapid flow of water through a pipe sucks in water from connected pipes.
As a result of this, sublimation involves not the suppression or repression of instincts and emotional experiences, nor merely the summation of them with another instinct, but their utilization as parts of a new whole, of which the dominant instinct is like the controlling head.
When the sex-instinct is repressed, the emotional and religious life is meagre, though often violent. When the sex-instinct and the religious feeling exist side by side, without conflict but without union, you have “the natural man” of St. Paul; but when the religious ideals are dominant, and can catch up the sex-instinct into themselves, and in so doing give it a new form and a new direction, then you get one of the highest types of emotional lives. Or fear may be sublimated to reverence; or sex again to art or to philanthropy.
In every case, a new and more complicated mental activity or organ is arrived at; and the same process that we saw at work in biological evolution—the creation of ever more complex units—is thereby continued.
Then we come to the fact that man displays disharmonies of mental construction, together with an innate hankering after harmony. The most obvious disharmony is that between the instincts that are self-regarding and those that are other-regarding—between man’s egotistic and his social tendencies.
It appears that man became gregarious quite late in evolutionary history. Through natural selection, sufficient “herd-instinct” was developed to ensure that men would on the whole stand by the tribe in danger, that the tribe should become a real biological unit. But it was impossible wholly to harmonize these new social instincts, even in the simplest societies, with the old, deeper-rooted, individualist tendencies; and as life became more complex and choice wider, conflict grew more and more frequent.[51]