es_.]

In personal life also the instinct of pugnacity and the feeling
of anger that goes with it seem to set loose immense floods
of reserve energy. McDougall exaggerates but a trifle when
he says it supplies the zest and determines the forms of all our
games and recreations, and nine tenths of the world's work is
done by it. "Our educational system is founded upon it; it is
the social force underlying an immense amount of strenuous
exertion; to it we owe in a great measure even our science, our
literature, and our art; for it is a strong, perhaps an essential,
element of ambition, that last infirmity of noble minds."[1]
In the overcoming of obstacles, whether in the work itself, or
in the difficulties that a surgeon or a scholar meets with, or
in frustrations deliberately put in our way by other people,
pugnacity is an invaluable stimulant and sustainer of action.
Every great personality of strong convictions and dominant
energy has possessed it to some extent; in characters of great
moral energy it sometimes takes the form of a volcanic and
virtuous wrath, as in the case of the Prophets of the Old
Testament, or of later religious and social reformers who
brought an earnest and bitter anger against the wrongs they
saw and literally fought to overcome.

[Footnote 1: McDougall: _loc. cit._, p. 294.]

THE "SUBMISSIVE INSTINCT." Of great importance in the
social relations of men is their original tendency to find
satisfaction in following, partly submitting to, or completely
surrendering to a person or cause more dominating than the
individual. Thorndike describes this instinct in its simplest
form:

There is an original tendency to respond to the situation, "the
presence of a human being larger than one's self, of angry or mastering
aspect," and to blows and restraint by submissive behavior.
When weak from wounds, sickness, or fatigue, the tendency is
stronger. The man who is bigger, who can outyell and outstare us,
who can hit us without our hitting him, and who can keep us from
moving, does originally extort a crestfallen, abashed physique and
mind. Women in general are thus by original nature submissive to
men in general. Every human being thus tends by original nature
to arrive at a status of mastery or submission toward every other
human being, and even under the more intelligent customs of civilized
life somewhat of the tendency persists in many men.[1]

[Footnote 1: Thorndike: _Educational Psychology_, br