freeing for higher activities instinctive force too often thrown away.
It is giving the wild beast his work to do, training him. Since the
instincts represent the efforts of this urgent life in us to achieve
self-protection and self-realization, it is plain that the true
regeneration of the psyche, its redirection from lower to higher levels,
can never be accomplished without their help. We only rise to the top of
our powers when the whole man acts together, urged by an enthusiasm or
an instinctive need.

Further, a complete and ungraduated response to stimulus--an
"all-or-none reaction"--is characteristic of the instinctive life and of
the instinctive life alone. Those whom it rules for the time give
themselves wholly to it; and so display a power far beyond that of the
critical and the controlled. Thus, fear or rage will often confer
abnormal strength and agility. A really dominant instinct is a veritable
source of psycho-physical energy, unifying and maintaining in vigour all
the activities directed to its fulfilment.[74] A young man in love is
stimulated not only to emotional ardour, but also to hard work in the
interests of the future home. The explorer develops amazing powers of
endurance; the inventor in the ecstasy of creation draws on deep vital
forces, and may carry on for long periods without sleep or food. If we
apply this law to the great examples of the spiritual life, we see in
the vigour and totality of their self-giving to spiritual interests a
mark of instinctive action; and in the power, the indifference to
hardship which these selves develop, the result of unification, of an
"all-or-none" response to the religious or philanthropic stimulus. It
helps us to understand the cheerful austerities of the true ascetic; the
superhuman achievement of St. Paul, little hindered by the "thorn in the
flesh"; the career of St. Joan of Arc; the way in which St. Teresa or
St. Ignatius, tormented by ill-health, yet brought their great