Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/92

88 minority of neurotic sensitives, in whom latent ancestral instinct is too strong to be driven out; it reverts in spite of all the attempts of teachers to suppress it, and drives the subject mad. "The majority call the minority mad," said one wise man; but it would be far truer to say that the majority drive the minority mad by attempting to suppress truth.

Many unexplained freaks of reversion become intelligible when we remember that any sight or sound which was associated in the ancestry with certain emotions tends to revive those emotions in sensitive descendants. To this fact we give the name of "instinct." The cat who has never before seen a dog, and the dog who has never before seen a cat, get what in a man we should call "a fit of homicidal mania" at sight of each other; an irrational desire to kill each other; because their ancestors had reasons, founded on knowledge and experience, for desiring each other's death. The young beetle who sees for the first time the petal-veining which is to be his honey-guide, no doubt feels throughout his frame the thrill of prophecy of a joy as yet unknown. He follows the guidance which he cannot understand, till he finds the explanation in a new world of delight. "For beast and bird have seen and heard that which man knoweth not;" because man considers his own instincts fit for nothing better than to be brutally trampled underfoot. Therefore, where a beetle becomes harmlessly drunk with joy, a man goes mad of suffering.

A dog and cat can be made devoted friends; not, however, by ignoring ancestral instinct, but by studying and guiding it.