Now, if it be true that man is not primarily a rational animal, if he be rather, _au fond_, a bundle, an assemblage, _an organism of instincts_, it behoves us to recognize in ourselves and in others the primary instincts, because from them flows all that goes to make up human nature, whether it be good or evil. Amongst these, certainly, is the parental instinct. Let us first consider its development in the individual, for this bears on the question when to begin education for motherhood. We find it very early indeed. It is commonly asserted that the doll instinct is the precursor, the infantile and childish form, of the parental instinct. Some psychologists, as we have already noted, assure us that this is wrong, that a small child will be just as content to play with anything else as with a doll; that the child gets fond of its possession, and that what we are really witnessing is the instinct of acquisitiveness. The rest may reason and welcome, but those who are fathers know. We have only to watch a child to learn that it very soon differentiates its doll, or rather, the shapeless mass it calls its doll, from other things. Try with your own children and see if you can get them to like anything else as well as they like a doll. They will not. There are few settled questions as yet in psychology, but we may certainly be sure that the parental instinct and its associated emotion may be unmistakably displayed as the master-passion in a child who is not yet two years old. In a case where the possibility of imitation was excluded I have seen a little girl adore a small baby, stroke its hands, whisper quasi-maternal sweet nothings to it--"mother it," in short--as plainly as I have seen the sun at noon; and there is no reason to suppose that this deeply impressive spectacle was exceptional. The parental instinct is connected subtly with the racial instinct; and it is undisputed that, except in utterly degraded persons, the object of the feelings which are associated with the racial instinct becomes the object of the feelings which are associated with the parental instinct. The object of the emotion of sex becomes also the object of tender emotion. Thus "love," in its lower sense, becomes exalted by Love in the noble sense.