Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/66

50 HENRY RUTGERS MARSHALL : nise are found in the fact that they guide many individuals, and that in their higher forms they guide a given individual under many varied conditions. Now evidently the important distinction thus to be noted, and in which process the functioning of our hypothetical governing instinct might be expected to aid us, can only be discovered by thoughtful reflexion upon the impulses which have guided our lives in the past, and which seem to guide others of our race ; and it appears that one way in which opportunity for such reflexion may best be obtained will be by voluntary or involuntary seclusion from the distracting influences which bear upon us in our every-day life. 12. We have seen that what we call success in life is determined largely by the emphasis of individualistic im- pulses, and that the desire for success is potent in suppress- ing the dominance of racial forces, which suppression our sought-for governing instinct should tend to oppose. Surely one way in which the effects of this wish for success and its resultants may best be regulated is by seclusion from the rest of the race without whose recognition success is an empty term. 13. Finally we have noted that the tendency to imitate the actions of others who vary from what is typical in directions which we deem advantageous, is powerful in leading to the obscuration of the deep-lying ethical impulses. But clearly the best means of overcoming this danger lies in the separation of ourselves from the influence of those who thus guide our actions, until such time as nature's impulses are able to assert themselves. 14. The reader cannot fail to have noticed that in each of the five sections preceding this we have argued with perhaps tedious repetition that each and all of the im- portant forces which we have noted as naturally leading to the over-emphasis of the variant influences within us may be held in check, if in no other way, by the acquisition of habits of seclusion from the distracting stimuli by which we are affected in our normal complex life ; or else by voluntary restraint for the time from reaction to the in- fluences which surround us. And it seems natural for us to suspect therefore that at least some considerable part of the expressions of the governing instinct for which we are in search will involve such restraint and such seclusion.