In animal life the situation is simple.  Whether the animal decides to fight for it or to run for it, he has at any rate two plain courses before him, and the relation between his emotional states and the type of situation is rather definitely fixed racially, and relatively constant.  Even in the associated life of animals the type of reaction is not much changed, and is here also instinctively fixed.  But in mankind the instinctive life is overshadowed or rivaled by the freedom of initiative secured through an extraordinary development of the power of inhibition and of associative memory, while, at the same time, this freedom of choice is hindered and checked by the presence of others.  The social life of mankind brings out a thousand situations unprovided for in the instincts and unanticipated in consciousness.  In the midst, then, of a situation relatively new in race experience, where advantage is still the all-important consideration, and where this can no longer be secured either by fighting or running, but by the good opinion of one’s fellows as well, we may look for some new strains upon the attention and some emotions not common to animal life.

I do not think we can entirely understand the nature of these emotional expressions in the race unless we realize that man is, in his savage as well as his civilized state, enormously sensitive to the opinion of others.[243] The longing of the Creek youth to “bring in hair” and be counted a man; the passion of the Dyak of Borneo for heads, and the recklessness of the modern soldier, “seeking the bubble reputation at the cannon’s mouth;” the alleged action of the young women of Kansas in taking a vow to marry no man who had not been to the Philippine war, and of the ladies of Havana, during the rebellion against Spain, in sending a chemise to a young man who stayed at home, with the suggestion that he wear it until he went to the field—­all indicate that the opinion of one’s fellows is at least as powerful a stimulus as any found in nature.  To the student of ethnology no point in the character of primitive man is more interesting and surprising than his vanity.  This unique susceptibility to social influence is, indeed, essential to the complex institutional and associational life of mankind.  The transmission of language, tradition, morality, knowledge, and all race experience from the older to the younger, and from one generation to another, is accomplished through mental suggestibility, and the activity of the individual in associational life is mediated largely through it.

Now, taking them as we find them, we know that such emotions as modesty and shame are associated with actions which injure and shock others, and show us off in a bad light.  They are violations of modes of behavior which have become habitual in one way and another.  In an earlier paper[244] have indicated some of the steps by which approvals and disapprovals were set up in the group.  When once a habit is