Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
What is man without the beasts? For if all the beast were gone, man would die of a great loneliness of the spirit.
A civilization that only looks inward will stagnate. We have to keep looking outward; we have to keep finding new avenues for human endeavor and human expression.
We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles.
Both our senses and our passions are a supply to the imperfection of our nature; thus they show that we are such sort of creatures as to stand in need of those helps which higher orders of creatures do not.
We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.
The dog is almost human in its demand for living interest, yet fatally less than human in its inability to foresee.
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.