It is difficult or impossible to say how far the current solicitude for the welfare of the race at large is to be credited to the parental bent, but it is beyond question that this instinctive disposition has a large part in the sentimental concern entertained by nearly all persons for the life and comfort of the community at large, and particularly for the community’s future welfare. Doubtless this parental bent in its wider bearing greatly reënforces that sentimental approval of economy and efficiency for the common good and disapproval of wasteful and useless living that prevails so generally throughout both the highest and the lowest cultures, unless it should rather be said that this animus for economy and efficiency is a simple expression of the parental disposition itself. It might on the other hand be maintained that such an animus of economy is an essential function of the instinct of workmanship, which would then be held to be strongly sustained at, this point by a parental solicitude for the common good. In making use of the expression, “instinct of workmanship” or “sense of workmanship,” it is not here intended to assume or to argue that the proclivity so designated is in the psychological respect a simple or irreducible element; still less, of course, is there any intention to allege that it is to be traced back in the physiological respect to some one isolable tropismatic sensibility or some single enzymotic or visceral stimulus. All that is matter for the attention of those whom it may concern. The expression may as well be taken to signify a concurrence of several instinctive aptitudes, each of which might or might not prove simple or irreducible when subjected to psychological or physiological analysis. For the present inquiry it is enough to note that in human behaviour this disposition is effective in such consistent, ubiquitous and resilient fashion that students of human culture will have to count with it as one of the integral hereditary traits of mankind.[12] As has already appeared, neither this nor any other instinctive disposition works out its functional content in isolation from the instinctive endowment at large. The instincts, all and several, though perhaps in varying degrees, are so intimately engaged in a play of give and take that the work of any one has its consequences for all the rest, though presumably not for all equally. It is this endless[13] complication and contamination of instinctive elements in human conduct, taken in conjunction with the pervading and cumulative effects of habit in this domain, that makes most of the difficulty and much of the interest attaching to this line of inquiry.