Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/773

 A THEORY OF SOCIAL MOTIVES 759

son is not mere instinct.^* In her love for him, she recalls many occasions of her care for him and some instances, perhaps, of his gratitude to her. But these memory-images are not the sole basis of her love for him. There are also, we must believe, many subconscious remnants of similar experiences which, like hidden springs, contribute their mite of feeling to the reservoir we call affection. That is, subconsciously the son is interwoven with her whole mature life and this subconscious basis registers itself in consciousness as an agglomeration of feeling-states, intro- spectively unanalyzable.

As a mother's relation to her son, to her introspection, appears both as reminiscence and as a volimie of unexplainable affection, so one's total disposition appears to introspection as an all-inclusive cognition and feeling which we term the self. When the conative phase of the self is thought of it is termed character. The self has an agitative, forceful, or expansive feeling-tone according to the temperament of the individual and the conditions of the physical and social environments, in reaction to which the disposition has been built up. Thus a hard-working population, used to weariness, have an agitative disposition because they habitually work until weary. Their essential impulse which is to prevail over this weariness I call the impulse of self-assertion. Habitualized and idealized it becomes the idea of endurance. This and other ideas of like feeling-tone associate effectively to form the ideal of austerity or stoicism. The population of Sparta and the first generations of the population of New England were austere. A population more easily circumstanced and hence not driven to overwork do not work to the agitation point and do not indulge themselves to the agitation point but strive to remain at their full force and their full capacity for enjoyment. This ideal of the mean was the ideal of the Athenians and is the ideal of a considerable part of our population of today. It is reached,

" If instinct is the chief element in parental care, among primitive peoples, why is it the rule that infants are not killed after they have been allowed to live a few days after birth ? Instinct acts as powerfully on the first day after binh as on the sixth or twelfth day. Therefore some other motive must arise to insure the preservation of the infant. This motive is parental emotion, which, habitually stirred, becomes the attitude of affection.