capitulation of those elements of original nature
which form the basis of all human action. We have seen
that human beings are equipped, apart from education or
training, with certain tendencies to act in certain definite
ways, given certain definite stimuli. Any single activity of
an average human being in a modern civilized community is
compounded of so many modifications of original tendencies
to action that these latter seem often altogether obliterated.
The conditions of civilized life, moreover, place continual
checks on the free activity of any given impulse, and there
are so many stimuli playing upon an individual at once that
the responses called out tend to inhibit each other. The
particular thing we say to an acquaintance we happen to
meet is not determined by a single original impulse, by love
or hate, fear or sympathy, pugnacity or pity. It is a compound
of some or of most of these. On the other hand, no
matter how complicated or sophisticated human action
becomes, it is built out of these same impulses, which were
operative when human beings had not yet passed out of
savagery. We may check and control our responses through
habitual repressions, through deliberate forethought, through
conscious or mechanical acquiescence in the ways of the
group among which we live. But these original impulses are
still the mainspring of our activities.

The complex, highly artificial character of our civilization
often obscures the presence of these powerful instinctive
tendencies, but that they _are_ present and powerful several
facts bear witness. They manifest themselves, as the newer
psychology of the subconscious has repeatedly pointed out,
in roundabout ways; they are, in the technical phrase, sublimated.
Instincts find, as it were, substitute realizations.
This process of sublimation of unfulfilled desire has been
noted particularly with regard to the sex instinct, but the
principle applies to the others.

The continual suppression of instincts results in various
forms of morbidity, in what Graham Wallas calls "baulked
dispositions." To say that instincts are repressed, is to say
there is a maladjustment between the individual as he comes
into the world, and the world as he finds it. This maladjustment
may vary in intensity. It may be exhibited in nothing
more serious than boredom, or petulance, or hyper-sensitiveness.
It may be a chronic sense of not fitting in, of being
lost in a blind alley. One has but to