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CERTAINLY we do not give our instinct anything like
a fair chance in this modern life. We have arranged
our moral obligations and our spiritual duties by codes
more or less severe; we have hedged about our material
life with such complete safety and so many conventions
that there remains comparatively little scope for the
individual will to exercise its initiative choice. Our
path of conduct is so closely prescribed that range
of choice is limited, and instinct atrophies. This is
wrong, surely. It must be culpable to allow any power,
so delicate, so strong, so beneficent and trustworthy
as the human instinct, to deteriorate and grow inoperative
from any cause whatever. [Page 30]
Yet every day we neglect to
consult our instinct. How many of us, when we sit down
at table, think instinctively what we should prefer
to eat? For the most part we consume what is set before
us, without question — pickles, candies, raw fruits,
and fried abominations without number — regardless
of utility or consequence. Then, as a reward of our
own stupidity, we must send for a doctor just so often
to undo the effects of our folly. Even those of us who
have sense enough to consider their food at all are
for the most content to regulate their diet according
to some hygienic formula, more or less admirable, no
doubt, but certainly universally applicable. Yet all
the while here is instinct only waiting to be consulted
to give us pretty sure and sound advice.
True, most of us could hardly depend on our own choice
now to guide our appetite; for instinct has been so
hampered and thwarted and choked and disregarded that
it has almost ceased to operate altogether. [Page
31] When we ought to consult it in regard to
the conduct of the body, for the maintenance of this
physical life, it is really not our instinct that we
consult at all, but our reason. We have made so much
of reason that we cannot get it out of the way and allow
instinct to govern for the moment. Yet there are regions
of activity where instinct should lead and reason only
advise. You and I each have an instinct as to what is
best for us in food or rest or sleep or exertion, if
we would only cultivate it, only give it play in our
lives. And if that instinct were educated, it would
guide us quite as infallibly in these matters as our
reason does in actual knowledge and thought; quite as
infallibly as our conscience does in matters of right
and wrong. Our instinct is a sort of conscience for
the body, and deserves our care and obedience just as
much as does that preceptor of morals.
But
we must not limit the realm of instinct to the governance
of the animal body. We must recall that it is a human
instinct, and [Page 32] has sane wisdom
applicable to all the doings of men. If I meet a new
acquaintance, my judgment of him must be made up from
my instinctive perception of the man, as well as from
the deductions of reason and intuition. I shall be told
certain facts concerning him, perhaps, and to these
facts I apply logic. I shall also have certain more
or less definite feelings about him, both sentimental
and sympathetic (or antipathetic), and these feelings
are derived from intuition and instinct. I shall know
immediately something of him spiritually. I cannot tell
how; and I shall know something of him through my senses,
by instinct.
It
is good to reason and to make the reason supreme in
this life. But it is fatal to disregard either intuition
or instinct. And of these two indispensable guides,
instinct is the most neglected, the most in need of
reinstatement in our regard. [Page 33]
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