“Oh, Academicus,” says William Law, in terms that any psychologist would endorse, “forget your scholarship, give up your art and criticism, be a plain man; and then the first rudiments of sense may teach you that there, and there only, can goodness be, where it comes forth as a birth of Life, and is the free natural work and fruit of that which lives within us.  For till goodness thus comes from a Life within us, we have in truth none at all.  For reason, with all its doctrine, discipline, and rules, can only help us to be so good, so changed, and amended, as a wild beast may be, that by restraints and methods is taught to put on a sort of tameness, though its wild nature is all the time only restrained, and in a readiness to break forth again as occasion shall offer."[72] Our business, then, is not to restrain, but to put the wild beast to work, and use its mighty energies; for thus only shall we find the power to perform hard acts.  See the young Salvation Army convert turning over the lust for drink or sexual satisfaction to the lust to save his fellow-men.  This transformation or sublimation is not the work of reason.  His instinctive life, the main source of conduct, has been directed into a fresh channel of use.

We may now look a little more closely at the character and potentialties of our instinctive life:  for this life is plainly of the highest importance to us, since it will either energize or thwart all the efforts of the rational self.  Current psychology, even more plainly than religion, encourages us to recognize in this powerful instinctive nature the real source of our conduct, the origin of all those dynamic personal demands, those impulses to action, which condition the full and successful life of the natural man.  Instincts in the animal and the natural man are the methods by which the life force takes care of its own interests, insures its own full development, its unimpeded forward drive.  In so far as we form part of the animal kingdom our own safety, property, food, dominance, and the reproduction of our own type, are inevitably the first objects of our instinctive care.  Civilized life has disguised some of these crude demands and the behaviour which is inspired by them, but their essential character remains unchanged.  Love and hate, fear and wonder, self-assertion and self-abasement, the gregarious, the acquisitive, the constructive tendencies, are all expressions of instinctive feeling; and can be traced back to our simplest animal needs.

But instincts are not fixed tendencies:  they are adaptable.  This can be seen clearly in the case of animals whose environment Is artificially changed.  In the dog, for instance, loyalty to the interests of the pack has become loyalty to his master’s household.  In man, too, there has already been obvious modification and sublimation of many instincts.  The hunting impulse begins in the jungle, and may end in the philosopher’s exploration of the Infinite.  It is the combative