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It may be added that this is by no means true of foot-fetichism only. In some other fetichisms a seemingly congenital predisposition is even more marked. In this sense, it will be seen, although it is hazardous to speak of foot-fetichism as strictly an atavism, it may certainly be said to arise on a congenital basis.
A great number of the buryings and other odd tricks of dogs must, however, I am sure, be considered as Atavism, and traced to the instincts bequeathed by their remote progenitors when yet "wild in the woods the noble beastie ran."
She could tell that her profound buffoon had only feigned this drowning in a sensitive abyss. There were no complaints, there was no rehashing of insignificant past events, and no attempt to demand more from her within a jealous male atavism that was instinct. They just touched each other's bodies like children the feel of their grandmothers' panty hose.
Take the case of the races which are known to be produced by the operation of atavism and variability, and the conditions of existence which check and modify these tendencies.
What is Mr. Darwin's hypothesis? As I apprehend it for I have put it into a shape more convenient for common purposes than I could find verbatim in his book as I apprehend it, I say, it is, that all the phenomena of organic nature, past and present, result from, or are caused by, the inter-action of those properties of organic matter, which we have called ATAVISM and VARIABILITY, with the CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE, or, in other words, given the existence of organic matter, its tendency to transmit its properties, and its tendency occasionally to vary; and, lastly, given the conditions of existence by which organic matter is surrounded that these put together are the causes of the Present and of the Past conditions of ORGANIC NATURE.
Science says, take a hundred men and a hundred women, and let them live on a fruitful island and multiply, and in four generations you will have an improved stock a stock freer from atavism, hysteria, anomalies, and insanities. Science holds out hope; you don't. You say God's will and decrees are eternal, and what they were a thousand ages since they will be a thousand ages to come.
I fancy that's how the majority of civilised people look at it, so that the absence of the moral, poetical element in love is treated in these days as a phenomenon, as a sign of atavism; they say it is a symptom of degeneracy, of many forms of insanity.
Man has never clothed himself in new garments of wisdom, but has ever been patching the old, and the old and the new are blended in the same pattern, and thus we have atavism in philosophy. So in the study of any philosophy which has reached the psychotheistic age, patches of the earlier philosophy are always seen.
In all these movements we see a striking illustration of what the biologists call the law of Atavism. There is a constant tendency to return to the primitive type. We can form some idea of what early Christianity was by reading the Acts of the Apostles.
We see frequently in states what physiologists call 'Atavism' the return, in part, to the unstable nature of their barbarous ancestors.
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