[Footnote 4: William Herbert Carruth.]

As the late Dr. Putnam of Harvard University says, "We stand as the
representative of a Creative Energy that expressed itself first in far
simpler forms of life and finally in the form of human instincts."[5]
And again: "The choices and decisions of the organisms whose lives
prepared the way through eons of time for ours, present themselves to
us as instincts."[6]

[Footnote 5: Putnam: _Human Motives_, p. 32.]

[Footnote 6: Putnam: _Human Motives_, p. 18.]


INTRODUCING THE INSTINCTS

=Back of Our Dispositions.= What is it that makes the baby jump at a
noise? What energizes a man when you tell him he is a liar? What makes
a young girl blush when you look at her, or a youth begin to take
pains with his necktie? What makes men go to war or build tunnels or
found hospitals or make love or save for a home? What makes a woman
slave for her children, or give her life for them if need be?
"Instinct" you say, and rightly. Back of every one of these well-known
human tendencies is a specific instinct or group of instincts. The
story of the life of man and the story of the mind of man must begin
with the instincts. Indeed, any intelligent approach to human life,
whether it be that of the mother, the teacher, the preacher, the
social worker or the neurologist, leads back inevitably to the
instincts as the starting-point of understanding. But what is