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Updated: May 27, 2025
There is so much that the normal self-preservative instincts in ourselves do not want said. But this Russian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace? What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Such revelations provoke and embarrass? What matter? We require embarrassment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must have no closed chinks, no blind alleys.
In wilderness life the feral arts of concealment, spying, false "leads," and doubling on trails, are the arts self-preservative. The native backwoodsman practices them as instinctively and with as little compunction upon his own species as upon the deer and the wolf from whom he learned them.
The total result of this singular attitude toward human life, which cannot be rightly described as either ascetic or mystical, but seems rather to have been based upon some self-preservative instinct, bidding him sacrifice lower and keener impulses to what he regarded as the higher and finer purpose of his being, is a certain clash and conflict of emotions, a certain sense of failure to attain the end proposed, which excuses, though I do not think it justifies, the psychologists, when they classify him among morbid subjects.
Even the treatment of instincts has been misleading. For instance, instincts have been discussed under such heads as the "self-preservative instincts," "the social instincts," just as if the child had an inborn, mystical something that told him how to preserve his life, or become a social king.
The self-preservative impulse of the simplest organism is the initial bias from which, by a continuous progression in the direction of first intent, have sprung the service of mankind and the love of God. There is an old and unprofitable quarrel between those who identify, and those who contrast, morality with nature.
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