However, it does not require much mental effort to sift fact from fancy in Dorsey. “The drive for a mate,” he assures us,[147] “is backed by a sensori-motor mechanism which functions till the mate is secured.” But everybody knows that the mechanism in question does not continue to function until a mate is secured; lacking a mate (to say nothing of the possibility of sublimation), its force will eventually be drained away through other channels. He himself admits this a few lines later on. But first he must say (on this same page) that “the mate-impulse is driven by an unconscious mechanism, and not by any desire of offspring.” Let it be granted that sex will function without desire of offspring--even in the face of a deadly dread of offspring. If it were not so, contraceptive methods would hardly have been invented to sterilize the sexual act. But how about this precious “mechanism” being unconscious? Does he mean that the mechanism itself is unconscious? Or that it acts without our being conscious of it? He leaves us in the dark, and we are driven to seek such light as our own experience may supply. And why does he leave us in the dark? Because, regarding us as mechanisms, he sees no difference between unconsciousness in ourselves and unconsciousness in the sex-glands and their accompanying organs! So he leaves us with the biologically natural raper who is unconscious of his rapacity, or whose body is ignorant of its biological naturalness. We may take our choice of interpretations. To say that the knife is ignorant of the murder committed with it, and to say that the murderer is ignorant of the murder he commits with the knife, is therefore saying one and the same thing. Both knife and murderer are mechanisms. And so, it is to be hoped, is the murdered one. Unconsciousness on his part would certainly help murder to fall unnoticed into the procession of the biologically natural. And now we turn to page 434 and learn that “as one calls the roll of the men who have rendered useful social service, one is impressed by the notion that most of them have succeeded not because but in spite of their training.” Here is the behaviorist, who calls in Dr. Watson to read his manuscript, delivering us suddenly hand and foot over to the hereditarians, to the eugenists--whom on other pages he professes to abhor. For it is utterly impossible to suppose that Dorsey means that the great succeed in spite of all circumstances through exercise of individual will inherited from nobody, and all their own. Then, two pages further on, we come to the eternal question of woman’s sphere. “Freedom of movement is soon limited for girls. Some learn to skip the rope and play jackstones only under parental frowns.... And as for climbing trees, playing marbles, going off swimming, who ever heard of such a thing!”