Page:"Homo Sum" being a letter to an anti-suffragist from an anthropologist.djvu/13

9 The real issue of a problem is always best seen when its factors are so far as possible simplified. We may therefore be pardoned if for a moment we go back to consider conditions of life less complex than our own. It was indeed in studying the psychology of primitive man, in noting how primitive man faced the problems of sex and humanity, that what may possibly be in part a solution of the difficulty occurred to me.

That frail, complex, pathetic thing we call our humanity is built up, it would seem, out of some few primitive instincts which we share with other animals and with some plants. Sex is one of these instincts, nutrition another, self-preservation a third. These three instincts all work together for the conservation of life in the individual. Each in itself gives satisfaction, and—a noticeable point—they do not normally clash. Each makes way for the other, no two acting simultaneously. Hunger appeased makes way for love, and love for hunger. Instincts on the whole tend to be recurrent rather than concurrent. If we had only these simple instincts to reckon with, if our humanity was based only on sex, self-preservation, nutrition, there would be, it seems, no "war in our members."