But if the animal instincts are the most widely related of those that display themselves in human conduct, more special instincts must be appealed to to account for what is special in the act. Well, in its proper place we find that the family of Robert Greslou had its roots in war-trodden Lorraine. Of no very remote peasant origin, son of a conquered race, he catches himself at certain moments reacting with instinctive hate toward an individual whom he hardly knows and who has done him no personal injury, yet whose every aspect shows him to have sprung from the conquerors, in whose most courteous gesture there lurks a polished insolence of aristocracy. When, then, a human pity for his prospective victim comes upon this “soul of prey,” it is such a hate that neutralizes it. “Why,” he cries, “in so many of my imaginings does Charlotte appear by the side of her brother André? What secret fibre of hatred had this man by his mere existence touched in my heart, that simply to imagine him with his sister dried up the fountain of my pity and left nothing in me but the will to win?” In answer we are expected to recall the moment when Robert Greslou, introduced into the family of the Marquis de Jussat as tutor to the younger son, finds himself for the first time in the presence of the Comte André, heir and dominating spirit of the house. “I felt then,” our young analyst records, “in its full force, in the depths of that instinct of life into which it is so hard for thought to descend, the revelation of that sense of race which modern science attributes to all nature, and which consequently must be found in man.... Why should not this hostility be an heredity like the rest? The horse that has never approached a lion trembles with fear when his stall is made up with straw on which such a beast of prey has lain. Then fear is inherited, and is not fear a form of hate? Why should not hate be inherited too? And in a thousand cases envy is probably nothing but that--was nothing more than that in my case, certainly,--the echo in us of hatreds long ago acquired by those whose sons we are, and which continue in us the battle of hearts begun hundreds of years ago.” No less carefully does our author work out another group of influences: those that fall within the experience of the individual. Influences of family, of school, of books read, of friends, of adventures of sex, of religious education, all culminating in the forming of a character whose foundations have already been laid in its heredities, in this case a type for which the French have invented the expressive term, a _cérébral_. The rest one can readily imagine, the delicate suggestions of daily life, the influences, slight in themselves, that play upon the attuned character and to which it resounds with acts of this kind or that, an instrument touched by the fingers of Fate. * * * * *