Comparative literature; Degeneration; Europe -- Intellectual life
itself into an organized faculty of the species, and the organism feels
subjectively, as a discomfort which may amount to pain, the warning
that a pernicious influence is acting upon it, and that it has to avoid
it. To escape from pain becomes one principal function of the organism,
which it cannot insufficiently provide against or neglect without
expiating that negligence by its ruin.
In the human being processes take place not otherwise than as they
have been here described. The hereditary organized experience of the
species warns him of the noxiousness of influences to which he is
frequently exposed. His outposts against naturally hostile forces are
his senses. Taste and smell give him, as to repulsive chimiotactic
matter, the impressions of nausea and of stench; the different kinds of
skin-sensations make him aware, through sensations of pain, heat, or
cold, that a given contact is unfavourable to him; eye and ear place
him on his guard, by loud, shrill, discordant sensations, against
the mechanical effects of certain physical phenomena. Finally, the
higher cerebral centres respond to recognised noxious influences of
a composite nature, or to the representation of them by an equally
composite reaction of aversion in different degrees of intensity, from
simple discomfort to horror, indignation, dismay, or fury.
The vehicle of this hereditary, organized, racial experience is the
unconscious life; to it is confided defence against simple, frequently
recurring noxious influences. Nausea at intolerable tastes, repugnance
to insufferable smells, the fear of dangerous animals, natural
phenomena, etc., have become for it an instinct to which the organism
abandons itself without reflection--_i.e._, without the intervention of
consciousness. But the human organism learns to distinguish and avoid
not only all that is directly prejudicial to itself; it acts in the
same way with regard to that which menaces it not as an individual, but
as a racial being, as a member of an organized society; antipathy to
influences injurious to the maintenance or prosperity of the society
becomes in him an instinct. But this enriching of organized unconscious
cognition represents a higher degree of development than many human
beings attain to. The social instincts are those that a man acquires
last of all, and, in conformity to a known law, he loses them first
when he retrogrades in his organic development.
Consciousness has occasion to declare the dangerous nature of
phenomena, and to defend the organism against it, only if these
phenomena are either quite new, or very rare, so that they cannot be
hereditarily recognised and dreaded; or if they enclose in themselves
many different elements, and do not act directly, but only by their
more or less remote consequences, so that to know them exacts a complex
activity of representation and judgment.
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