Man has more and more, as he has advanced in mental growth, rejected the unreasoning instinctive classes of action, and substituted for them action based on his own experience and conscious memory, action which is the result of education--not the education of the school, but that of life in all its variety. But in many things he is still entirely guided by unreasoning mechanical instinct, and in others he is partly impelled by the old inherited instinct, partly restrained and guided by reason based on experience and memory. This makes the comparison of the courting man with the courting animal doubly interesting. We ought to distinguish what he is doing as a result of ancient inherited mechanism from what he is doing as a result of conscious observation, memory, and reasoning. CHAPTER XXI COURTSHIP IN ANIMALS AND MAN THE German poet Schiller arrived long ago at the conclusion that the machinery of the world is driven by hunger and by love. If we join with hunger, which is the craving of the individual for nourishment, the activities which aim at self-defence,--whether against competitors for food, against would-be devourers, or against dangers to life and limb, from storm, flood, and temperature,--we may accept Schiller's statement as equivalent to this, namely, that the activities and the mechanisms of living things are related to two great ends--the preservation of the individual and the preservation of the race. "Love," or what we should call in more discriminating language "amorousness," or the "mating hunger," is the absolute and inherent attribute of living things upon which the preservation of the race depends. The preservation of the individual is of less importance in the scheme of Nature than the preservation of the race, and we find that food-hunger and the risk of dangers of all kinds to the continuance of an individual life are made of no account when satisfaction of mate-hunger and the preservation and perpetuation of the race requires the sacrifice or the shortening of the life, or the permanent distortion or self-immolation of the individual. Eccentric behaviour and strange exaggeration of form and colour, as judged by the standard of preservation of the individual, are found to be explained as due to structures (nervous or other) implanted in the race by natural selection, because, and in consequence of, the fact that they tend to the satisfaction of mate-hunger, and consequently to the preservation of the race.