in an automobile on a crowded thoroughfare,
will interfere with just as normal, natural, and inevitable
desires on the part of other motorists and pedestrians.

Still another imperative reason for the control of our instinctive
equipment lies in the fact that instincts as such are inadequate
to adjust either the individual or the group to contemporary
conditions. They were developed in the process
of evolution as useful methods for enabling the human animal
to cope with a radically different and incomparably simpler
environment. While the problems and processes of his life
and environment have grown more complex, man's inborn
equipment for controlling the world he lives in has, through
the long history of civilization, remained practically
unchanged. But as his equipment of mechanisms for reacting
to situations is the same as that of his prehistoric ancestors,
so are his basic desires. And the satisfaction of man's primary
impulses is less and less attainable through the simple,
unmodified operation of the mechanisms of response with
which they are associated. In the satisfaction of the desire
for food, for example, which remains the same as it was under
primitive forest conditions, much more complex trains of
behavior are required than are provided by man's native
equipment. To satisfy the hunger of the contemporary citizens
of New York or London requires the transformation of
capricious instinctive responses into systematic and controlled
processes of habit and thought. The elaborate systems of
agriculture, transportation, and exchange which are necessary
in the satisfaction of the simplest wants of men in civilization
could never be initiated or carried on if we depended on the
instincts with which we are born.

There are thus seen to be at least three distinct reasons why
our native endowment of capacities and desires needs control
and direction. In the life of the individual, instinctive
desires must be adjusted to one another in order that their
harmonious fulfillment may be made possible. The desires and
native reactions of individuals must be checked and modified
if individuals are to live successfully and amiably in group
association, in which they must, in any case, live. And, finally,
so vastly complicated have become the physical and the
social machinery of civilized life that it is literally impossible
to depend on instincts to adjust us to an environment far different
from that to which they were in