The rest may reason and welcome, but those who are fathers know. We
have only to watch a child to learn that it very soon differentiates its
doll, or rather, the shapeless mass it calls its doll, from other
things. Try with your own children and see if you can get them to like
anything else as well as they like a doll. They will not. There are few
settled questions as yet in psychology, but we may certainly be sure
that the parental instinct and its associated emotion may be
unmistakably displayed as the master-passion in a child who is not yet
two years old. In a case where the possibility of imitation was excluded
I have seen a little girl adore a small baby, stroke its hands, whisper
quasi-maternal sweet nothings to it--"mother it," in short--as plainly
as I have seen the sun at noon; and there is no reason to suppose that
this deeply impressive spectacle was exceptional.
The parental instinct is connected subtly with the racial instinct; and
it is undisputed that, except in utterly degraded persons, the object of
the feelings which are associated with the racial instinct becomes the
object of the feelings which are associated with the parental instinct.
The object of the emotion of sex becomes also the object of tender
emotion. Thus "love," in its lower sense, becomes exalted by Love in the
noble sense.
There is also in us an instinct of pugnacity, which especially appears
when the working of any other instinct is thwarted.
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