This principle of inhibition by conflict allows us to understand the imperative persistence (if not the genesis) of certain sexual perversions in otherwise healthy-minded and normal people who have a loathing for such perversions in other people but can not overcome them in themselves. H. O., for example, has such a perversion, and yet the idea of this perversion in another person excites a lively emotion of disgust. In other words, at bottom, as we say, she is right-minded. How then account for the continuance of a self practice which she reprobates in another, censures in herself, and desires to be free of, and why does not the instinct of repulsion, and the sentiment of self respect, etc., act in herself as a safeguard? Introspective examination shows that when the sexual emotion is awakened, disgust and the sentiments of pride and self respect are suppressed, and the momentarily activating instinct determines all sorts of sophistical reasoning by which the perversion is justified to herself. As soon as the instinct accomplishes its aim it becomes exhausted, and at once intense disgust, meeting with no opposition, becomes awakened and in turn determines once more her right-minded ideas. Based upon this mechanism one therapeutic procedure would be to organize artificially so intense sentiments of disgust for the perversion and of self-respect that they would suppress the sexual impulse.[229] Likewise the intense religious emotions (awe, reverence, self-abasement, divine love, etc.) may, if sufficiently strong, suppress the opposing instincts of anger, fear, play, and self-assertion, and emotions compounded of them. Examples might be cited from the lives of religious martyrs and fanatics. If it is true that “the instincts are the prime movers of all human activity,” and that through their systematic organization with ideas into sentiments they are so harnessed and brought under subjection that they can be utilized for the well-being of the individual; and if through this harnessing the immediate promptings of the emotions are brought under volitional control, then _all conduct, in the last analysis, is determined by the conative force of instincts_[230] (and other innate dispositions) harnessed though they be to ideas. For though volition itself can control, reinforce, and determine the particular sentiment and thus govern conduct,—reinforce, for instance, a weaker abstract moral sentiment so that it shall dominate any lower brutish instinct or sentiment with which it conflicts, still, volition must be a more complex form of conation and itself issue from sentiments. We need not enter into this troublesome problem of the nature of the will;[231] nor does it concern us. It is enough for our purpose to recognize that volition can reinforce a sentiment and thus take part in conflicts. In this way undesirable instincts and sentiments can he voluntarily overcome and inhibited or repressed and mental processes and conduct determined.