And so they are while children.
II
The eternal pull between civilizing Mind (Oh, centuries yet from being
civilized!) and the memoried but obstinate old lady at the wheel (who
laughs when a man of powerful will and too active mind "wills" sleep;
forcing him finally to choose between the horrors of insomnia, the
insidious tyranny of drugs, and the doubtful and wearisome alternative of
psychotherapeutics)--this pull, automatic in people of low estate, becomes
bitter and often appalling where the mind is highly developed and attuned
besides to the codes and customs of the best that civilization has so far
accomplished.
The most vital of all these functions, for without it Mother Earth would be
like an ant hill without ants, and all these ancient norms of daughters
as homeless as the rest of the fates, is what man in a spirit of social
compromise has labeled an instinct--the sex-instinct. It is no more
an instinct than recurring sleep, lymphatic action, hunger, thirst,
alimentation. It is a primal function for which Mind, wisely foreseeing the
consequences of too much Nature, long since created laws both civil and
social to curb. There are many impulses, Inherited, from ten thousand
ancestors and constantly jogged by Earth's busy agent, human nature, that
may logically be called instincts (their roots lying in the ancient social
groups and their struggle to exist) but not a function that governs the
law of reproduction, as appetite governs the law of renewing the vital
necessities of the body.
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