Racial differences in respect of these hereditary spiritual traits count for much in the outcome, because in the last resort any race is at the mercy of its instincts. In the course of cultural growth most of those civilisations or peoples that have had a long history have from time to time been brought up against an imperative call to revise their scheme of institutions in the light of their native instincts, on pain of collapse or decay; and they have chosen variously, and for the most part blindly, to live or not to live, according as their instinctive bias has driven them. In the cases where it has happened that those instincts which make directly for the material welfare of the community, such as the parental bent and the sense of workmanship, have been present in such potent force, or where the institutional elements at variance with the continued life-interests of the community or the civilisation in question have been in a sufficiently infirm state, there the bonds of custom, prescription, principles, precedent, have been broken—or loosened or shifted so as to let the current of life and cultural growth go on, with or without substantial retardation. But history records more frequent and more spectacular instances of the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture than of peoples who have by force of instinctive insight saved themselves alive out of a desperately precarious institutional situation, such, for instance, as now faces the peoples of Christendom.
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Chief among those instinctive dispositions that conduce directly to the material well-being of the race, and therefore to its biological success, is perhaps the instinctive bias here spoken of as the sense of workmanship. The only other instinctive factor of human nature that could with any likelihood dispute this primacy would be the parental bent. Indeed, the two have much in common. They spend themselves on much the same concrete objective ends, and the mutual furtherance of each by the other is indeed so broad and intimate as often to leave it a matter of extreme difficulty to draw a line between them. Any discussion of either, therefore, must unavoidably draw the other into the inquiry to a greater or less extent, and a characterisation of the one will involve some dealing with the other.
As the expression is here understood, the “Parental Bent” is an instinctive disposition of much larger scope than a mere proclivity to the achievement of children.[11] This latter is doubtless to be taken as a large and perhaps as a primary element in the practical working of the parental solicitude; although, even so, it is in no degree to be confused with the quasi-tropismatic impulse to the procreation of offspring. The parental solicitude in mankind has a much wider bearing than simply the welfare of one’s own children. This wider bearing is particularly evident in those lower cultures where the scheme of consanguinity and inheritance is not drawn on the same close family lines as among civilised peoples, but it is also to be seen in good vigour in any civilised community. So, for instance, what the phrase-makers have called “race-suicide” meets the instinctive and unsolicited reprobation of all men, even of those who would not conceivably go the length of contributing in their own person to the incoming generation. So also, virtually all thoughtful persons,—that is to say all persons who hold an opinion in these premises,—will agree that it is a despicably inhuman thing for the current generation wilfully to make the way of life harder for the next generation, whether through neglect of due provision for their subsistence and proper training or through wasting their heritage of resources and opportunity by improvident greed and indolence. Providence is a virtue only so far as its aim is provision for posterity.
It is difficult or impossible to say how far the current solicitude for the welfare of the race at large is to be credited to the parental bent, but it is beyond question that this instinctive disposition has a large part in the sentimental concern entertained by nearly all persons for the life and comfort of the community at large, and particularly for the community’s future welfare. Doubtless this parental bent in its wider bearing greatly reënforces that sentimental approval of economy and efficiency for the common good and disapproval of wasteful and useless living that prevails so generally throughout both the highest and the lowest cultures, unless it should rather be said that this animus for economy and efficiency is a simple expression of the parental disposition itself. It might on the other hand be maintained that such an animus of economy is an essential function of the instinct of workmanship, which would then be held to be strongly sustained at, this point by a parental solicitude for the common good.
In making use of the expression, “instinct of workmanship” or “sense of workmanship,” it is not here intended to assume or to argue that the proclivity so designated is in the psychological respect a simple or irreducible element; still less, of course, is there any intention to allege that it is to be traced back in the physiological respect to some one isolable tropismatic sensibility or some single enzymotic or visceral stimulus. All that is matter for the attention of those whom it may concern. The expression may as well be taken to signify a concurrence of several instinctive aptitudes, each of which might or might not prove simple or irreducible when subjected to psychological or physiological analysis. For the present inquiry it is enough to note that in human behaviour this disposition is effective in such consistent, ubiquitous and resilient fashion that students of human culture will have to count with it as one of the integral hereditary traits of mankind.[12]
As has already appeared, neither this nor any other instinctive disposition works out its functional content in isolation from the instinctive endowment at large. The instincts, all and several, though perhaps in varying degrees, are so intimately engaged in a play of give and take that the work of any one has its consequences for all the rest, though presumably not for all equally. It is this endless[13] complication and contamination of instinctive elements in human conduct, taken in conjunction with the pervading and cumulative effects of habit in this domain, that makes most of the difficulty and much of the interest attaching to this line of inquiry.
There are few lines of instinctive proclivity that are not crossed and coloured by some ramification of the instinct of workmanship. No doubt, response to the direct call of such half-tropismatic, half-instinctive impulses as hunger, anger, or the promptings of sex, is little if at all troubled with any sentimental suffusion of workmanship; but in the more complex and deliberate activities, particularly where habit exerts an appreciable effect, the impulse and sentiment of workmanship comes in for a large share in the outcome. So much so, indeed, that, for instance, in the arts, where the sense of beauty is the prime mover, habitual attention to technique will often put the original, and only ostensible, motive in the background. So, again, in the life of religious faith and observance it may happen now and again that theological niceties and ritual elaboration will successfully, and in great measure satisfactorily, substitute themselves for spiritual communion; while in the courts of law a tenacious following out of legal technicalities will not infrequently defeat the ends of justice.
As the expression is here understood, all instinctive action is intelligent in some degree; though the degree in which intelligence is engaged may vary widely from one instinctive disposition to another, and it may even fall into an extremely automatic shape in the case of some of the simpler instincts, whose functional content is of a patently physiological character. Such approach to automatism is even more evident in some of the lower animals, where, as for instance in the case of some insects, the response to the appropriate stimuli is so far uniform and mechanically determinate as to leave it doubtful whether the behaviour of the animal might not best be construed as tropismatic action simply.[14] Such tropismatic directness of instinctive response is less characteristic of man even in the case of the simpler instinctive proclivities; and the indirection which so characterises instinctive action in general, and the higher instincts of man in particular, and which marks off the instinctive dispositions from the tropisms, is the indirection of intelligence. It enters more largely in the discharge of some proclivities than of others; but all instinctive action is intelligent in some degree. This is what marks it off from the tropisms and takes it out of the category of automatism.[15]
Hence all instinctive action is teleological. It involves holding to a purpose. It aims to achieve some end and involves some degree of intelligent faculty to compass the instinctively given purpose, under surveillance of the instinctive proclivity that prompts the action. And it is in this surveillance and direction of the intellectual processes to the appointed end that the instinctive dispositions control and condition human conduct; and in this work of direction the several instinctive proclivities may come to conflict and offset, or to concur and reënforce, one another’s action.