Man has fancied himself in a position in the animal world that facts of life and nature do not sustain.  We seem to feel that man has some high calling; that he should make something of himself which cannot be accomplished; that he should form some sort of a perfect order that he never can reach; in short that man has a purpose and a mission.  It is manifest that all we know is but a mite compared with the unknown, and it may be that sometime a purpose will be revealed of which man never dreamed.  Still from all that we can see and understand, Nature has but one desire, and that is the preservation and perpetuation of life.  This is its purpose or, rather, its strongest urge not only with men but with all animal life.  Sometimes to create one fish a million eggs are spawned.  Nature is profligate both in spawning life and compassing its destruction.  In the human species the capacity for life is immeasurably beyond its fruition.  A large portion of those who are born die an early death.  And that human life shall not be extinct, Nature plants the life-giving desire deep in the constitution of man.  The creation of life comes from an instinct so profound and absorbing that it carries a train of evils in its wake.  Many are overweighted by the sex instinct to their positive harm.  Nature somehow did not trust such a fundamental duty as the preservation of the race to reason.  If intellectual processes were responsible for life, the world no doubt would soon be bare of animate things.  Neither could the care of the young be trusted to anything but the deep-seated instinct that causes the mother to forget her own life in the preservation of the life of her child.

The functions of body, on which life is founded, do not depend upon reason.  The heart begins to beat before birth; it continues to beat until the end of life.  The reason has nothing to do with the heart performing its function.  Man goes to sleep at night confident that it will still be beating in the morning.  The blood circulates in the veins independent of the thoughts of man.  The digestive processes go on whether he sleeps or is awake.  Many of his muscles never rest from birth to death.  Life could not be preserved through the intellectual processes.

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.  These instincts and emotions are incident to every living machine and are the motor forces that impel the organism.  They do not think.  They act, and act at once.  All the mind can do is to place some restraint on such instincts and emotions through experience, education and settled habits.  If the actions are never inhibited, the machine will tear itself to pieces.  If too easily inhibited, it will do no work.  It is manifest that the perfect machine does not exist.

Man is moved by his instinct of flight and his emotion of fear, which are set in motion by apprehended dangers and by unaccustomed sights or sounds.  Terror sometimes becomes so intense that it prevents flight and brings convulsions and death.  It is idle to reason with one in terror.  It is idle to reason with a mob in terror or a nation in terror.  One might as well expect to calm a tempestuous sea with soft words.