Disgust

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Cleanliness. Seeing how very filthy savages and exceptional individuals among civilized people may be, philosophers have doubted whether any genuine instinct of cleanliness exists, and whether education and habit be not responsible for whatever amount of it is found. Were it an instinct, its stimulus would be dirt, and its characteristic reaction the shrinking from contact therewith, and the cleaning of it away after contact had occurred. Now, if some animals are cleanly, men may be so, and there can be no doubt that some kinds of matter are natively repugnant, both to sight, touch, and smell—excrementitious and putrid things, blood, pus, entrails, and diseased tissues, for example. It is true that the shrinking from contact with these things may be inhibited very easily, as by a medical education; and it is equally true that the impulse to clean them away may be inhibited by so slight an obstacle as the thought of the coldness of the ablution, or the necessity of getting up to perform it. It is also true than an impulse to cleanliness, habitually checked, will become obsolete fast enough. But none of these facts prove the impulse never to have been there.[408] It seems to be there in all cases; and then to be particularly amenable to outside influences, the child having his own degree of squeamishness about what he shall touch or eat, and later being either hardened or made more fastidious still by the habits he is forced to acquire and the examples among which he lives. Examples get their hold on him in this way, that a, particularly evil-smelling or catarrhal or lousy comrade is rather offensive to him, and that he sees the odiousness in another of an amount of dirt to which he would have no spontaneous objection if it were on his own skin. That we dislike in others things which we tolerate in ourselves is a law of our æsthetic nature about which there can be no doubt. But as soon as generalization and reflection step in, this judging of others leads to anew way of regarding ourselves. "Who taught you politeness? The impolite," is, I believe, a Chinese proverb. The concept, 'dirty fellow,' which we have formed, becomes one under which we personally shrink from being classed; and so we 'wash up,' and set ourselves right, at moments when our social self-conscious-ness is awakened, in a manner toward which no strictly instinctive native prompting exists. But the standard of cleanliness attained in this way is not likely to go beyond the mutual tolerance for one another of the members of the tribe, and hence may comport a good deal of actual filth.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  in boys who are brought up naturally. especially in the country. Everyone knows what pleasure a boy takes in the sight of a butterfly, fish, crab or other animal, or of a bird's nest, and what a strong propensity he has for pulling apart, breaking, opening, and destroying all complex objects, how he delights in pulling out the wings and legs of flies, and tormenting one animal or another, how greedy he is to steal secret dainties, with what irresistible strength the plundering of birds' nests attracts him without his banning the least intention of eating the eggs or the young birds. This fact has long been familiar, and is daily remarked by teachers; but an explanation of these impulses which follow upon a mere perception of the objects, without in most cases any representation being aroused of a future pleasure to be gained, has as yet been given by no one, and yet the impulses are very easy to explain. In many cases it will be said that the boy pulls things apart from curiosity. Quite correct: but whence comes this curiosity, this irresistible desire to open everything and see what is inside? What makes the boy take the eggs from the nest and destroy them when he never thinks of eating them? These are effects of an hereditary instinct, so strong that warnings and punishments are unable to counteract it." (Schneider: Der Menschliche Wille, p. 224. See also Der Thierische Wille, pp. 180-2.)[392] It is not surprising, in view of the facts of animal history and evolution, that the very special object blood should have become the stimulus for a very special interest and excitement. That the sight of it should make people faint is strange. Less so that a child who sees his blood flow should forthwith become much more frightened than by the mere feeling of the cut. Horned cattle often, though not always, become furiously excited at the smell of blood. In some abnormal human beings the sight or thought of it exerts a baleful fascination. "B and his father were at a neighbor's one evening, and, while paring apples, the old man accidentally cut his hand so severely as to cause the blood to flow profusely: B was observed to become restless, nervous, pale, and to have undergone a peculiar change in demeanor. Taking advantage of the distraction produced by the accident, B escaped from the house and proceeded to a neighboring farm-yard, where he cut the throat of a horse, killing it." Dr. D. H. Tuke, commenting on this man's case (Journal of Mental Science, October.1885), speaks of the influence of blood upon him—his whole life had been one chain of cowardly atrocities—and continues: "There can be no doubt that with some individuals it constitutes a fascination.... We might speak of a mania sanguinis. Dr. Savage admitted a man from France into Bethlehem Hospital some time ago, one of whose earliest symptoms of insanity was the thirst for blood, which he endeavored to

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  worthy, clean, agreeable, and conscientious male or female hypocrite at so many guineas a year to do so and so for me. Were he other than hypocrite, I would send him about his business."[408] "The insane symptom called "mysophobia," or dread of foulness, which leads a patient to wash his hands perhaps a hundred times a day, hardly seems explicable without supposing a primitive impulse to clean one's self of which it is, as it were, the convulsive exaggeration.[409] "We often find modesty coming in only in the presence of foreigners, especially of clothed Europeans. Only before these do the Indian women in Brazil cover themselves with their girdle, only before these do the women on Timor conceal their bosom. In Australia we find the same thing happening." (Th. Waltz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, vol. I. p.358.) The author gives bibliographical references, which I omit.[410] To most of us it is even unpleasant to sit down in a chair still warm from occupancy by another person's body. To many, hand-shaking is disagreeable.[411] Some will, of course, find the list too large, others too small. With the boundaries of instinct finding into reflex action below, and into acquired habit or suggested activity above, it is likely that there will always be controversy about just what to include under the class-name. Shall we add the propensity to walk along a curbstone, or any other narrow path. to the list of instincts? Shall we subtract secretiveness, as due to shyness or to fear? Who knows? Meanwhile our physiological method has this inestimable advantage, that such questions of limit have neither theoretical nor practical importance. The facts once noted. it matters little how they are named. Most authors give a shorter list than that in the text. The phrenologists add adhesiveness, inhabitiveness, love of approbation, etc., etc., to their list of 'sentiments' which in the main agree with our list of instincts. Fortlage, in his System der Psychologie, classes among the Triebe all the vegetative physiological functions. Santlus (Zur Psychologie der Menschlichen Triebe, Leipsic, 1864) says there are at bottom but three instincts, that of 'Being, that of 'Function,' and that of 'Life.' The 'Instinct of Being' he subdivides into animal, embracing tile activities of all the senses; and psychical, embracing the acts of the intellect and of the 'transempiric consciousness.' The 'Instinct of Function' he divides into sexual, inclinational (friendship, attachment, honor); and moral (religion, philanthropy, faith, truth, moral freedom, etc.). The 'Instinct of Life' embraces conservation (nutrition, motion); sociability (imitation, juridical and ethical arrangements); and personal interest (love of independence and freedom, acquisitiveness, self-defence). Such a muddled list as this shows how great are the advantages of the physiological analysis we have used.[412] Parts of this chapter have already appeared in an article published in 1884 in Mind.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  closely resembling sensible impressions (sounds, tints of color) presented, which of them was the same with one presented a moment before. And it does seem here as if the fading process in the just-excited tract must combine with the process of the new impression to give to the latter a peculiar subjective tinge which should separate it from the impressions which the other objects give. But recognition of this immediate sort is beyond our power after a very short time has intervened. A couple of minutes' interval is generally fatal to it; so that it is impossible to conceive that our frequent instantaneous recognition of a face, e.g., as having been met before, takes place by any such simple process. Where we associate a head of classification with the object, the time-interval has much less effect. Dr. Lehmann could identify shades of gray much more successfully and permanently after mentally attaching names or numbers to them. Here it is the recall of the contiguous associate, the number or name, which brings about the recognition. Where an experience is complex, each element of the total object has had the other elements for its past contiguous associates. Each element thus tends to revive the other elements from within, at the same time that the outward object is making them revive from without. We have thus, whenever we meet a familiar object, that sense of expectation gratified which is so large a factor in our æsthetic emotions; and even were there no 'fringe of tendency' toward the arousal of extrinsic associates (which there certainly always is), still this intrinsic play of mutual association among the parts would give a character of ease to familiar percepts which would make of them a distinct subjective class. A process fills its old bed in a different way from that in which it makes a new bed. One can appeal to introspection for proof. When, for example, I go into a slaughter-house into which I once went years ago, and the horrid din of the screaming hogs strikes me with the overpowering sense of identification, when the blood-stained face of the 'sticker,' whom I had long ceased to think of, is immediately recognized as the face that struck me so before; when the dingy and reddened woodwork, the purple-flowing floor, the smell, the emotion of disgust, and all the details, in a word, forthwith re-establish themselves as familiar occupants of my mind; the extraneous associates of the past time are anything but prominent. Again, in trying to think of an engraving, say the portrait of Rajah Brooke prefixed to his biography, I can do so only partially; but when I take down the book and, looking at the actual face, am smitten with the intimate sense of its sameness with the one I was striving to resuscitate,—where in the experience is the element of extrinsic association? In both these cases it surely feels as if the moment when the sense of recall is most vivid were also

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Or what shall be said of a shy and unsociable man who receives point-blank an invitation to a small party? The thing is to him an abomination; but your presence exerts a compulsion on him, he can think of no excuse, and so says yes, cursing himself the while for what he does. He is unusually sui compos who does not every week of his life fall into some such blundering act as this. Such instances of voluntas invita show not only that our acts cannot all be conceived as effects of represented pleasure, but that they cannot even be classed as cases of represented good. The class 'goods' contains many more generally influential motives to action than the class 'pleasants.' Pleasures often attract us only because we deem them goods. Mr. Spencer, e.g., urges us to court pleasures for their influence upon health, which comes to us as a good. But almost as little as under the form of pleasures do our acts invariably appear to us under the form of goods. All diseased impulses and pathological fixed ideas are instances to the contrary. It is the very badness of the act that gives it then its vertiginous fascination. Remove the prohibition, and the attraction stops. In my university days a student threw himself from an upper entry window of one of the college buildings and was nearly killed. Another student, a friend of my own, had to pass the window daily in coming and going from his room, and experienced a dreadful temptation to imitate the deed. Being a Catholic, he told his director, who said, 'All right! if you must, you must,' and added, 'Go ahead and do it,' thereby instantly quenching his desire. This director knew how to minister to a mind diseased. But we need not go to minds diseased for examples of the occasional tempting-power of simple badness and unpleasantness as such. Every one who has a wound or hurt anywhere, a sore tooth, e.g., will ever and anon press it just to bring out the pain. If we are near a new sort of stink, we must sniff it again just to verify once more how bad it is. This very day I have been repeating over and over to myself a verbal jingle whose mawkish silliness was the secret of its haunting power. I loathed yet could not banish it. Believers in the pleasure-and-pain theory must thus, if they are candid, make large exceptions in the application of their creed. Action from 'fixed ideas' is accordingly a terrible stumbling-block to the candid Professor Bain. Ideas have in his psychology no impulsive but only a 'guiding' function, whilst

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Tissot apparently recognized the symptoms of syphilis and gonorrhea, which were considered a single disease at the time. But he misunderstood these symptoms as signs of semen depletion due to promiscuity, prostitution, and masturbation. 3 A century later, in 1858, a British gynecologist named Isaac Baker Brown (president of the Medical Society of London at the time) proposed that most women’s diseases were attributable to overexcitement of the nervous system, with the pudic nerve, which runs to the clitoris, being particularly culpable. He listed the eight stages of progressive disease triggered by female masturbation: Hysteria Spinal irritation Hysterical epilepsy Cataleptic fits Epileptic fits Idiocy Mania Death Baker Brown argued that surgical removal of the clitoris was the best way to prevent this fatal slide from pleasure to idiocy to death. After gaining considerable celebrity and performing an unknown number of clitorectomies, Baker Brown’s methods fell out of favor and he was expelled from the London Obstetrical Society in disgrace. Baker Brown subsequently went insane, and clitorectomy was discredited in British medical circles. 4 Unfortunately, Baker Brown’s writing had already had a significant impact on medical practice across the Atlantic. Clitorectomies continued to be performed in the United States well into the twentieth century as a cure for hysteria, nymphomania, and female masturbation. As late as 1936, Holt’s Diseases of Infancy and Childhood, a respected medical-school text, recommended surgical removal or cauterization of the clitoris as a cure for masturbation in girls. By the middle of the twentieth century, as the procedure was finally falling into disrepute in the United States, it was revived with a new rationale. Now, rather than a way to stamp out masturbation, surgical removal of large clitorises was recommended for cosmetic purposes. 5 Before becoming a target for surgery, the clitoris had been ignored by male authors of elaborate anatomical sketchbooks for centuries. It wasn’t until the mid-1500s that a Venetian professor by the name of Matteo Realdo Colombo, who had previously studied anatomy with Michelangelo, stumbled upon a mysterious protuberance between a woman’s legs. As described in Federico Andahazi’s historical novel The Anatomist, Colombo made this discovery while examining a patient named Inés de Torremolinos. Colombo noted that Inés grew tense when he manipulated this small button, and that it appeared to grow in size at his touch. Clearly, this would require further exploration. After examining scores of other women, Colombo found that all of them had this same heretofore “undiscovered” protuberance and that they all responded similarly to gentle manipulation. In March of 1558, Andahazi tells us that Colombo proudly reported his “discovery” of the clitoris to the dean of his faculty. 6 As Jonathan Margolis speculates in O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, the response was probably not what Colombo had anticipated. The professor was “arrested in his classroom within days, accused of heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft and Satanism, put on trial and imprisoned.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Lest we start feeling too smug in our compassion and superiority, recall the foundling hospitals of Europe. The number of babies delivered to near-certain death in France rose from 40,000 in 1784 to almost 140,000 by 1822. By 1830, there were 270 revolving boxes in French foundling hospital doors specially designed to protect the anonymity of those depositing unwanted infants. Eighty to 90 percent of these children are estimated to have died within a year of arrival. Once our ancestors began cultivating land for food, they were running on a wheel, but never fast enough. More land provides more food. And more food means more children born and fed. More children provide more help on the farm and more soldiers. But this population growth creates demand for more land, which can be won and held only through conquest and war. Put another way, the shift to agriculture was accelerated by the seemingly irrefutable belief that it’s better to take strangers’ land (killing them if necessary) than to allow one’s own children to die of starvation. Closer to our own time, the BBC reports that as many as 15 percent of the reported deaths of female infants in parts of southern India are victims of infanticide. Millions more die in China, where female infanticide is prevalent, and has been for centuries. A late nineteenth-century missionary living in China reported that of 183 sons and 175 daughters born in a typical community, 126 of the sons lived to age ten (69 percent), while only 53 of the daughters made it that far (30 percent). 7 China’s one-child policy, combined with the cultural preference for sons, has only worsened the already dismal odds of survival for female infants. 8 There are also problematic cultural assumptions lurking within demographers’ calculations, in which life is assumed to begin at birth. This view is far from universal. Societies that practice infanticide don’t consider newborn infants full human beings. Rituals ranging from baptism to naming ceremonies are delayed until it is determined whether or not the child will be permitted to live. If not, from this perspective, the child was never fully alive anyway. 9 Is 80 the New 30? Cartoon in The New Yorker: Two cavemen are shown chatting, one of whom is saying, “Something’s just not right—our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past thirty.” Statistical distortions due to infanticide are not the only source of confusion concerning prehistoric longevity. As you might imagine, it’s not so easy to determine the age at death of a skeleton that’s been in the ground for thousands of years. For various technical reasons, archaeologists often underestimate the age at death.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  13 Circumcision remains prevalent in the United States, though varying greatly by region, ranging from about 40 percent of newborns circumcised in western states to about twice that in the Northeast. 14 This widespread procedure, rarely a medical necessity, has its roots in the anti-masturbation campaigns of Kellogg and his like-minded contemporaries. As Money explains, “Neonatal circumcision crept into American delivery rooms in the 1870s and 1880s, not for religious reasons and not for reasons of health or hygiene, as is commonly supposed, but because of the claim that, later in life, it would prevent irritation that would cause the boy to become a masturbator.” 15 Lest you think Kellogg was interested only in the sadistic torture of boys, in the same book he soberly advises the application of carbolic acid to the clitorises of little girls to teach them not to touch themselves. Kellogg and his like-minded contemporaries demonstrate that sexual repression is a “malady that considers itself the remedy,” to paraphrase Karl Kraus’s dismissal of psychoanalysis. His smug satisfaction in tormenting children is striking and disturbing, but Kellogg’s “no child left alone” policy is anything but unusual or limited to ancient history. The anti-masturbation measures quoted above were published in 1888, but more than eighty years were to pass before the American Medical Association declared, in 1972, “Masturbation is a normal part of adolescent sexual development and requires no medical management.” But still, the war continues. As recently as 1994, pediatrician Joycelyn Elders was forced from her post as Surgeon General of the United States for simply asserting that masturbation “is part of human sexuality.” The suffering caused by centuries of war on masturbation is beyond calculation. But this we know: all the suffering, every bit of it, was for nothing. Absolutely nothing. John Harvey Kellogg, Anthony Comstock, and Sylvester Graham (inventor of Graham crackers—like corn flakes, a food specifically designed to discourage masturbation) were extreme in their grim campaigns against eroticism, but they weren’t considered particularly eccentric at the time. 16 Recall that Darwin probably had had little or no personal sexual experience when he married his first cousin a month before his thirtieth birthday, and that Sigmund Freud—the other towering giant of nineteenth-century sexual theory—was a self-proclaimed thirty-year-old virgin when he married in 1886. No wonder Freud was hesitant sexually. According to biographer Ernest Jones, Freud’s father had threatened to cut off young Sigmund’s penis if he didn’t stop his obsessive masturbating. 17 The Curse of Calvin Coolidge Last time I tried to make love to my wife nothing was happening. So I said to her, “What’s the matter, you can’t think of anybody either?” R ODNEY D ANGERFIELD Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  These were not exceptional cases, as Twain knew. Following the advice of such prominent “experts” as John Harvey Kellogg, many parents of Twain’s day subjected their children to brutal physical and mental abuse to stamp out any sign of sexuality. Otherwise reasonable, if confused, people ardently believed that masturbation truly was “the destroying element of civilized society,” in the words of the New Orleans Medical & Surgical Journal. Though widely considered to be one of the leading sex educators of his day, Kellogg proudly claimed never to have had intercourse with his wife in over four decades of marriage. But he did require a handsome male orderly to give him an enema every morning—an indulgence his famously high-fiber breakfasts should have made unnecessary. As John Money explains in his study of pseudoscientific anti-sex crusaders, The Destroying Angel, Kellogg would probably be diagnosed as a klismaphile today. Klismaphilia is “an anomaly of sexual and erotic functioning traceable to childhood, in which an enema substitutes for regular sexual intercourse. For the klismaphile,” writes Money, “putting the penis in the vagina is experienced as hard work, dangerous, and possibly as repulsive.” As a medical doctor, Kellogg claimed the moral authority to instruct parents on the proper sexual education of their children. If you’re unfamiliar with the writings of Kellogg and others like him, their gloating disdain for basic human eroticism is chilling and unmistakable. In his best-selling Plain Facts for Old and Young (written on his sexless honeymoon in 1888), Kellogg offered parents guidance for dealing with their sons’ natural erotic self-exploration in a section entitled “Treatment for Self-Abuse and its Effects.” “A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys,” he wrote, “is circumcision.” He stipulated that, “The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment…. [emphasis added]” If circumcising a struggling, terrified boy without anesthesia wasn’t quite what a parent had in mind, Kellogg recommended “the application of one or more silver sutures in such a way as to prevent erection. The prepuce, or foreskin, is drawn forward over the glans, and the needle to which the wire is attached is passed through from one side to the other. After drawing the wire through, the ends are twisted together and cut off close. It is now impossible for an erection to occur….” Parents were assured that sewing their son’s penis into its foreskin “acts as a most powerful means of overcoming the disposition to resort to the practice [of masturbation].”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  (Socio-Erotic Exchanges, if you’ve forgotten) is the explicit prohibition against relations with one’s habitual partner(s), sometimes even under threat of death. Why would that be? Since these rituals have developed in unrelated cultures throughout the world, they probably serve important functions. Internal conflict represented an existential threat to profoundly interdependent groups like those in which our ancestors lived for thousands of generations. Ritualized, socially sanctioned, sometimes even obligatory S.E.Ex. reduced disruptions caused by jealousy and possessiveness while blurring paternity. It’s not surprising that small-scale societies highly dependent upon trust between individuals, generosity, and cooperation evolve and promote ways of enhancing these qualities while discouraging behavior and beliefs that would threaten group harmony and survival for group members. It bears repeating that we are not attributing any particular nobility or, for that matter, ignobility to foragers. Some behaviors that seem normal to contemporary people (and which are therefore readily assumed to be universal) would quickly destroy many small-scale foraging societies, rendering them dysfunctional. Unrestrained self-interest, in particular, whether expressed as food-hoarding or excessive sexual possessiveness, is a direct threat to group cohesion and is therefore considered shameful and ridiculous. Photo: Christopher White, www.christopherwhitephotography.com Is there any doubt that societies can reshape such impulses? Right now, girls’ necks are being elongated ring by brass ring in parts of Thailand and Burma to make them more appealing to men. Clitorises are being cut away and labia sewn together in villages all over North Africa to dampen female desire, while in glamorous California, reduction labioplasty and other cosmetic vaginal surgeries have recently become a booming business. Elsewhere, the penises of boys are being circumcised or split open in ritualistic subincision. You get the point. A few Native American tribes of the upper plains had an agreed-upon sense of beauty that led them to strap small planks of wood to their infants’ still-pliable foreheads. 4 As the child grew, the straps would be tightened, as an orthodontist realigns a bite, bit by bit. It’s unclear how much brain damage, if any, resulted from this practice, but the otherworldly conical heads that resulted scared the bejesus out of neighboring tribes and white fur trappers in the area. Field sketch by Paul Kane 5 And that may well have been the point, if you will. If their otherworldly appearance gave them a protective advantage by scaring potential enemies, it’s not hard to see how such a fashion statement could have evolved. From savoring saliva beer or cow blood milkshakes to wearing socks with sandals, there is little doubt that people are willing to think, feel, wear, do, and believe pretty much anything if their society assures them it’s normal.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  In addition to all the direct evidence presented here, the circumstantial case against the narrative is overwhelming. For starters, recall that the total number of monogamous primate species that live in large social groups is precisely zero —unless you insist on counting humans as the one and only example of such a beast. The few monogamous primates that do exist (out of hundreds of species) all live in the treetops. Primates aside, only 3 percent of mammals and one in ten thousand invertebrate species can be considered sexually monogamous. Adultery has been documented in every ostensibly monogamous human society ever studied, and is a leading cause of divorce all over the world today. But even in the latest editions of his classic book The Naked Ape, the same Desmond Morris who observed soccer players happily sharing their lovers still insists that “among humans sexual behavior occurs almost exclusively in a pair-bonded state,” and that “adultery reflects an imperfection in the pair-bonding mechanism.” 18 That’s a major minor “imperfection.” As we write these words, CNN reports that six adulterers are being stoned to death in Iran. Before the hypocritical sinners throw the first stones, the male adulterers will be buried up to their waists. In a sickening gesture toward chivalry, the women will be buried to their necks, presumably to bring a quicker death to these women who dared consider their bodies their own. Such brutal execution of sexual transgressors is anything but an oddity, historically speaking. “Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism each share a fundamental concern over the punishment for a woman’s sexual freedom,” says Eric Michael Johnson. “Whereas any ‘man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife [both] the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death,’ (Leviticus 20:10) but any unmarried woman who has sexual relations with an unmarried man shall be brought ‘to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die’ (Deuteronomy 22:21).” 19 Yet even after centuries of such barbaric punishment, adultery persists everywhere, without exception. As Alfred Kinsey noted back in the 1950s, “Even in cultures which most rigorously attempt to control the female’s extramarital coitus, it is perfectly clear that such activity does occur, and in many instances it occurs with considerable regularity.” 20 Think about that. No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied—including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all this bloody retribution, it’s hard to see how monogamy comes “naturally” to our species.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  And however white and beautiful her bare arms are, however beautiful her full figure and her eager face under her black curls, he will find something better still, just as my disgusting, pitiful, and charming husband does.' Dolly made no answer, she merely sighed. Anna noticed this sigh, indicating dissent, and she went on. In her armoury she had other arguments so strong that no answer could be made to them. 'Do you say that it's not right? But you must consider,' she went on; 'you forget my position. How can I desire children? I'm not speaking of the suffering, I'm not afraid of that. Think only, what are my children to be? Ill-fated children, who will have to bear a stranger's name. For the very fact of their birth they will be forced to be ashamed of their mother, their father, their birth.' 'But that is just why a divorce is necessary.' But Anna did not hear her. She longed to give utterance to all the arguments with which she had so many times convinced herself. 'What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world?' She looked at Dolly, but without waiting for a reply she went on— 'I should always feel I had wronged these unhappy children,' she said. 'If they are not, at any rate they are not unhappy; while if they are unhappy, I alone should be to blame for it.' These were the very arguments Darya Alexandrovna had used in her own reflections; but she heard them without understanding them. 'How can one wrong creatures that don't exist?' she thought. And all at once the idea struck her: could it possibly, under any circumstances, have been better for her favourite Grisha if he had never existed? And this seemed to her so wild, so strange, that she shook her head to drive away this tangle of whirling, mad ideas. 'No, I don't know; it's not right,' was all she said, with an expression of disgust on her face. 'Yes, but you mustn't forget that you and I . . . And besides that,' added Anna, in spite of the wealth of her arguments and the poverty of Dolly's objections, seeming still to admit that it was not right, 'don't forget the chief point, that I am not now in the same position as you. For you the question is do you desire not to have any more children; while for me it is: do I desire to have them. And that's a great difference. You must see that I can't desire it in my position.' Darya Alexandrovna made no reply.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Either she was taking the children of a Russian family home from the springs, or fetching a shawl for a sick lady, and wrapping her up in it, or trying to interest an irritable invalid, or selecting and buying cakes for tea for someone. Soon after the arrival of the Shtcherbatskys there appeared in the morning crowd at the springs two persons who attracted universal and unfavourable attention. These were a tall man with a stooping figure, and huge hands, in an old coat too short for him, with black, simple, and yet terrible, eyes, and a pock-marked, kind-looking woman, very badly and tastelessly dressed. Recognising these persons as Russians, Kitty had already in her imagination begun constructing a delightful and touching romance about them. But the princess, having ascertained from the visitors' list that this was Nikolay Levin and Marya Nikolaevna, explained to Kitty what a bad man this Levin was, and all her fancies about these two people vanished. Not so much from what her mother told her, as from the fact that it was Konstantin's brother, this pair suddenly seemed to Kitty intensely unpleasant. This Levin, with his continual twitching of his head, aroused in her now an irrepressible feeling of disgust. It seemed to her that his big, terrible eyes, which persistently pursued her, expressed a feeling of hatred and contempt, and she tried to avoid meeting him. XXXI I T was a wet day; it had been raining all the morning, and the invalids, with their parasols, had flocked into the arcades. Kitty was walking there with her mother, and the Moscow colonel, smart and jaunty in his European coat, bought ready-made at Frankfort. They were walking on one side of the arcade, trying to avoid Levin, who was walking on the other side. Varenka, in her dark dress, in a black hat with a turn-down brim, was walking up and down the whole length of the arcade with a blind Frenchwoman, and, every time she met Kitty, they exchanged friendly glances. 'Mamma, couldn't I speak to her?' said Kitty, watching her unknown friend, and noticing that she was going up to the spring, and that they might come there together. 'Oh, if you want to so much, I'll find out about her first and make her acquaintance myself,' answered her mother. 'What do you see in her out of the way? A companion, she must be. If you like, I'll make acquaintance with Madame Stahl; I used to know her belle-soeur,' added the princess, lifting her head haughtily. Kitty knew that the princess was offended that Madame Stahl had seemed to avoid making her acquaintance. Kitty did not insist. 'How wonderfully sweet she is!' she said, gazing at Varenka just as she handed a glass to the Frenchwoman.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She pictured him to herself as talking calmly to his mother and Princess Sorokin and rejoicing at her sufferings.. 'Yes, I must go quickly,' she said, not knowing yet where she was going. She longed to get away as quickly as possible from the feelings she had gone through in that awful house. The servants, the walls, the things in that house—all aroused repulsion and hatred in her and lay like a weight upon her. 'Yes, I must go to the railway station, and if he's not there, then go there and catch him.' Anna looked at the railway time-table in the newspapers. An evening train went at two minutes past eight. 'Yes, I shall be in time.' She gave orders for the other horses to be put in the carriage, and packed in a travelling-bag the things needed for a few days. She knew she would never come back here again. Among the plans that came into her head she vaguely determined that after what would happen at the station or at the countess's house, she would go as far as the first town on the Nizhigorod road and stop there. Dinner was on the table; she went up, but the smell of the bread and cheese was enough to make her feel that all food was disgusting. She ordered the carriage and went out. The house threw a shadow now right across the street, but it was a bright evening and still warm in the sunshine. Annushka, who came down with her things, and Pyotr, who put the things in the carriage, and the coachman, evidently out of humour, were all hateful to her, and irritated her by their words and actions. 'I don't want you, Pyotr.' 'But how about the ticket?' 'Well, as you like, it doesn't matter,' she said crossly. Pyotr jumped on the box, and putting his arms akimbo, told the coachman to drive to the booking-office. XXX 'H ERE it is again! Again I understand it all!' Anna said to herself, as soon as the carriage had started, and swaying lightly, rumbled over the tiny cobbles of the paved road, and again one impression followed rapidly upon another. 'Yes; what was the last thing I thought of so clearly?' she tried to recall it.' "Tiutkin, coiffeur?" —no, not that. Yes, of what Yashvin says, the struggle for existence and hatred is the one thing that holds men together. No, it's a useless journey you're making,' she said, mentally addressing a party in a coach and four, evidently going for an excursion into the country. 'And the dog you're taking with you will be no help to you. You can't get away from yourselves.'

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Of course this is not the only way in which we learn to subordinate our lower selves to our higher. A direct ethical judgment unquestionably also plays its part, and last, not least, we apply to our own persons judgments originally called forth by the acts of others. It is one of the strangest laws of our nature that many things which we are well satisfied with in ourselves disgust us when seen in others. With another man's bodily 'hoggishness' hardly anyone has any sympathy;—almost as little with his cupidity, his social vanity and eagerness, his jealousy, his despotism, and his pride. Left absolutely to myself I should probably allow all these spontaneous tendencies to luxuriate in me unchecked, and it would be long before I formed a distinct notion of the order of their subordination. But having constantly to pass judgment on my associates, I come ere long to see, as Herr Horwicz says, my own lusts in the mirror of the lusts of others, and to think about them in a very different way from that in which I simply feel . Of course, the moral generalities which from childhood have been instilled into me accelerate enormously the advent of this reflective judgment on myself. So it comes to pass that, as aforesaid, men have arranged the various selves which they may seek in an hierarchical scale according to their worth. A certain amount of bodily selfishness is required as a basis for all the other selves. But too much sensuality is despised, or at best condoned on account of the other qualities of the individual. The wider material selves are regarded as higher than the immediate body. He is esteemed a poor creature who is unable to forego a little meat and drink and warmth and sleep for the sake of getting on in the world. The social self as a whole, again, ranks higher than the material self as a whole. We must care more for our honor, our friends, our human ties, than for a sound skin or wealth. And the spiritual self is so supremely precious that, rather than lose it, a man ought to be willing to give up friends and good fame, and property, and life itself. In each kind of self, material, social, and spiritual, men distinguish between the immediate and actual, and the remote and potential , between the narrower and the wider view, to the detriment of the former and advantage of the latter.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Tom Bowling is the soul of honor, and has been true to Black-eyed Syousan since the last time they parted at Wapping Old Stairs; but do you suppose Tom is perfectly frank, familiar, and above-board in his conversation with Admiral Nelson, K.C.B.? There are secrets, prevarications, fibs. if you will, between Tom and the admiral-between your crew (of servants) and their captain. I know I hire a worthy, clean, agreeable, and conscientious male or female hypocrite at so many guineas a year to do so and so for me. Were he other than hypocrite, I would send him about his business."[408] "The insane symptom called "mysophobia," or dread of foulness, which leads a patient to wash his hands perhaps a hundred times a day, hardly seems explicable without supposing a primitive impulse to clean one's self of which it is, as it were, the convulsive exaggeration.[409] "We often find modesty coming in only in the presence of foreigners, especially of clothed Europeans. Only before these do the Indian women in Brazil cover themselves with their girdle, only before these do the women on Timor conceal their bosom. In Australia we find the same thing happening." (Th. Waltz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, vol. I. p.358.) The author gives bibliographical references, which I omit.[410] To most of us it is even unpleasant to sit down in a chair still warm from occupancy by another person's body. To many, hand-shaking is disagreeable.[411] Some will, of course, find the list too large, others too small. With the boundaries of instinct finding into reflex action below, and into acquired habit or suggested activity above, it is likely that there will always be controversy about just what to include under the class-name. Shall we add the propensity to walk along a curbstone, or any other narrow path. to the list of instincts? Shall we subtract secretiveness, as due to shyness or to fear? Who knows? Meanwhile our physiological method has this inestimable advantage, that such questions of limit have neither theoretical nor practical importance. The facts once noted. it matters little how they are named. Most authors give a shorter list than that in the text. The phrenologists add adhesiveness, inhabitiveness, love of approbation, etc., etc., to their list of 'sentiments' which in the main agree with our list of instincts. Fortlage, in his System der Psychologie, classes among the Triebe all the vegetative physiological functions. Santlus (Zur Psychologie der Menschlichen Triebe, Leipsic, 1864) says there are at bottom but three instincts, that of 'Being, that of 'Function,' and that of 'Life.' The 'Instinct of Being' he subdivides into animal, embracing tile activities of all the senses; and psychical, embracing the acts of the intellect and of the 'transempiric consciousness.' The 'Instinct of Function' he divides into sexual, inclinational (friendship, attachment, honor); and moral (religion, philanthropy, faith, truth, moral freedom, etc.). The 'Instinct of Life' embraces conservation (nutrition, motion); sociability (imitation, juridical and ethical arrangements); and personal interest (love of independence and freedom, acquisitiveness, self-defence).

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Taken in conjunction with the two former principles—that the same object may excite ambiguous impulses, or suggest an impulse different from that which it excites, by suggesting a remote object—they explain any amount of departure from uniformity of conduct, without implying any getting out of gear of the elementary impulses from which the conduct flows. 1. The law of inhibition of instincts by habits is this: When objects of a certain class elicit from an animal a certain sort of reaction, it often happens that the animal becomes partial to the first specimen of the class on which it has reacted, and will not afterward react on any other specimen. The selection of a particular hole to live in, of a, particular mate, of a particular feeding-ground, a particular variety of diet, a particular anything, in short, out of a possible multitude, is a very wide-spread tendency among animals, even those low down in the scale. The limpet will return to the same sticking-place in its rook, and the lobster to its favorite nook on the sea-bottom. The rabbit will deposit its dung in the same corner; the bird makes its nest on the same bough. But each of these preferences carries with it an insensibility to other opportunities and occasions—an insensibility which can only be described physiologically as an inhibition of new impulses by the habit of old ones already formed. The possession of homes and wives of our own makes us strangely insensible to the charms of those of other people. Few of us are adventurous in the matter of food; in fact, most of us think there is something disgusting in a bill of fare to which we are unused. Strangers, we are apt to think, cannot be worth knowing, especially if they come from distant cities, etc. The original impulse which got us homes, wives, dietaries, and friends at all, seems to exhaust itself in its first achievements and to leave no surplus energy for reacting on new cases. And so it comes about that, witnessing this torpor, an observer of mankind might say that no instinctive propensity toward certain objects existed at all. It existed, but it existed miscellaneously, or as an instinct pure and simple, only before habit was formed. A habit, once grafted on an instinctive tendency, restricts the range of the tendency itself, and keeps us from reacting on any but the habitual object, although other objects might just as well have been chosen had they been the first-comers.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Or what shall be said of a shy and unsociable man who receives point-blank an invitation to a small party? The thing is to him an abomination; but your presence exerts a compulsion on him, he can think of no excuse, and so says yes, cursing himself the while for what he does. He is unusually sui compos who does not every week of his life fall into some such blundering act as this. Such instances of voluntas invita show not only that our acts cannot all be conceived as effects of represented pleasure, but that they cannot even be classed as cases of represented good. The class 'goods' contains many more generally influential motives to action than the class 'pleasants.' Pleasures often attract us only because we deem them goods. Mr. Spencer, e.g., urges us to court pleasures for their influence upon health, which comes to us as a good. But almost as little as under the form of pleasures do our acts invariably appear to us under the form of goods. All diseased impulses and pathological fixed ideas are instances to the contrary. It is the very badness of the act that gives it then its vertiginous fascination. Remove the prohibition, and the attraction stops. In my university days a student threw himself from an upper entry window of one of the college buildings and was nearly killed. Another student, a friend of my own, had to pass the window daily in coming and going from his room, and experienced a dreadful temptation to imitate the deed. Being a Catholic, he told his director, who said, 'All right! if you must, you must,' and added, 'Go ahead and do it,' thereby instantly quenching his desire. This director knew how to minister to a mind diseased. But we need not go to minds diseased for examples of the occasional tempting-power of simple badness and unpleasantness as such. Every one who has a wound or hurt anywhere, a sore tooth, e.g., will ever and anon press it just to bring out the pain. If we are near a new sort of stink, we must sniff it again just to verify once more how bad it is. This very day I have been repeating over and over to myself a verbal jingle whose mawkish silliness was the secret of its haunting power. I loathed yet could not banish it. Believers in the pleasure-and-pain theory must thus, if they are candid, make large exceptions in the application of their creed. Action from 'fixed ideas' is accordingly a terrible stumbling-block to the candid Professor Bain. Ideas have in his psychology no impulsive but only a 'guiding' function, whilst

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Cleanliness. Seeing how very filthy savages and exceptional individuals among civilized people may be, philosophers have doubted whether any genuine instinct of cleanliness exists, and whether education and habit be not responsible for whatever amount of it is found. Were it an instinct, its stimulus would be dirt, and its characteristic reaction the shrinking from contact therewith, and the cleaning of it away after contact had occurred. Now, if some animals are cleanly, men may be so, and there can be no doubt that some kinds of matter are natively repugnant, both to sight, touch, and smell—excrementitious and putrid things, blood, pus, entrails, and diseased tissues, for example. It is true that the shrinking from contact with these things may be inhibited very easily, as by a medical education; and it is equally true that the impulse to clean them away may be inhibited by so slight an obstacle as the thought of the coldness of the ablution, or the necessity of getting up to perform it. It is also true than an impulse to cleanliness, habitually checked, will become obsolete fast enough. But none of these facts prove the impulse never to have been there.[408] It seems to be there in all cases; and then to be particularly amenable to outside influences, the child having his own degree of squeamishness about what he shall touch or eat, and later being either hardened or made more fastidious still by the habits he is forced to acquire and the examples among which he lives. Examples get their hold on him in this way, that a, particularly evil-smelling or catarrhal or lousy comrade is rather offensive to him, and that he sees the odiousness in another of an amount of dirt to which he would have no spontaneous objection if it were on his own skin. That we dislike in others things which we tolerate in ourselves is a law of our æsthetic nature about which there can be no doubt. But as soon as generalization and reflection step in, this judging of others leads to anew way of regarding ourselves. "Who taught you politeness? The impolite," is, I believe, a Chinese proverb. The concept, 'dirty fellow,' which we have formed, becomes one under which we personally shrink from being classed; and so we 'wash up,' and set ourselves right, at moments when our social self-conscious-ness is awakened, in a manner toward which no strictly instinctive native prompting exists. But the standard of cleanliness attained in this way is not likely to go beyond the mutual tolerance for one another of the members of the tribe, and hence may comport a good deal of actual filth.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The marriage bed was renounced as contrary to God’s law, and some went so far as to say openly that the human body was made by the devil. The love of husband and wife should be like the love of Christ for the Church, without carnal desire. The command to avoid looking on a woman, Matt. 5:27, 28, was taken literally, and the command to leave husband and wife was interpreted to mean the renunciation of sexual cohabitation. Witnesses condemned marriage absolutely,1003 and no man or woman living in sexual relations could be saved. The opinion prevailed, at least among some Catharan groups, that the eating of the forbidden fruit in Eden meant carnal cohabitation.1004 As for animal nourishment, not only were all meats forbidden, but also eggs and cheese. The reason given was that these were the product of carnal intercourse.1005 The words of Peter on the housetop, Acts 10:14, were also quoted. The Cathari, however, allowed themselves fish, in view of Christ’s example in feeding the multitude and his example after his resurrection, when he gave fish to his disciples. The killing of animals, birds, and insects, except frogs and serpents, was also forbidden.1006 The ultimate ground for this refusal to kill animal life was stated by one of the Inquisitorial manuals to be a belief in metempsychosis, the return of the souls of the dead in the bodies of animals. The condemnation of capital punishment was based on such passages as: "Give place unto wrath, vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord," Rom. 12:19; and the judicial execution of heretics and criminals was pronounced homicide, a survival from the Old Testament and the influence of its evil god. The Cathari quoted Christ’s words, "Ye have heard how it hath been said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."1007 One of the charges made against the established Church was that it countenanced war and marshalled armies. The interdiction of oaths was in obedience to the words of Christ, and was in the interest of strict integrity of speech.1008 The Cathari also renounced priestly vestments, altars, and crosses as idolatrous. They called the cross the mark of the beast, and declared it had no more virtue than a ribbon for binding the hair. It was the instrument of Christ’s shame and death, and therefore not to be used.1009 Thorns or a spear would be as appropriate for religious symbols as the cross. They also rejected, as might have been expected, the doctrines of purgatory and indulgences.1010 In addition to the consolamentum, the Cathari practised two rites called the melioramentum and the endura.1011 The melioramentum, which is adduced again and again in the judicial sentences, was a veneration of the officials administering the consolamentum, and consisted of a threefold salutation. The Catholics regarded it as a travesty of the adoration of the host.1012