Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/518

 504 B. R. MAKETT : for all time, to be severally carved and fashioned by semi- conscious and conscious agencies, but never to be fused or compounded, even partially, into a fresh whole. Now such a notion, I would venture to contend, is radically false and worthless. The evolution of instinct qua instinct would seem rather and I think that Mr. Marshall is with me here -to resemble that expanding spiral so dear to evolu- tionary metaphor. Individual instinct (if so it may be called) coming first, it must on the subsequent appearance of the sexual instinct, be supposed to yield up a certain part of its peculiar character to be absorbed or at any rate in some sense appropriated by the latter. Then in its turn the sexual instinct including the portion of it that consists in trans- formed individual instinct will be drawn upon to provide some of the material, so to speak, for the social instinct which arrives to complete the ascending series. Thus the Individual Self that arises out of individual competition, and persists as such whole and untouched even when the social stage is reached, will have to be identified with that miserable remnant of individual instinct which has never entered into combination with the higher and more universal tendencies truly 'the sifted sediment of a residuum,' to borrow a description applied by Clifford to something very different. But this is not the Individual Self of Clifford's Ethics or of any possible Ethics. A glance at Sociological Origins as tentatively outlived by Anthropology will help to make this clear. Such a tendency as the ' fighting impulse,' rooted as it undoubtedly is in the primordial and purely individualistic element in our nature, is not as such debarred from contributing to the content of the social instinct is not, as we may now put it, on that account ignored or rejected by society but is utilised in the service of tribal defence, that is, of group- conservation. The spring of the fighting impulse never- theless resides in a different part of the ' biological Self ' to that whence comes the impulse that controls and regulates its activity. It is in fact at once self-regarding and other- regarding, at once bound up with the impulse to fight for pure self and with the impulse to think no more of self than of others. Nevertheless on the whole it must be judged to tend in accordance with its ultimate origin to be allied more closely with the former impulse. And now by way of con- trast let us consider the instinctive tendency to be generous. Here again there are the two sides to be discerned, the side that flatters the self-esteem of the giver and the side that regards the interest of the receiver of the gift. In this case,