and it is equally true that the impulse to clean them away may be inhibited by so slight an obstacle as the thought of the coldness of the ablution, or the necessity of getting up to perform it.It is also true than an impulse to cleanliness, habitually checked, will become obsolete fast enough.But none of these facts prove the impulse never to have been there.
It seems to be there in all cases; and then to be particularly amenable to outside influences, the child having his own degree of squeamishness about what he shall touch or eat, and later being either hardened or made more fastidious still by the habits he is forced to acquire and the examples among which he lives.
Examples get their hold on him in this way, that a, particularly evil-smelling or catarrhal or lousy comrade is rather offensive to him, and that he sees the odiousness in another of an amount of dirt to which he would have no spontaneous objection if it were on his own skin.That we dislike in others things which we tolerate in ourselves is a law of our æsthetic nature about which there can be no doubt.But as soon as generalization and reflection step in, this judging of others leads to anew way of regarding ourselves." Who taught you politeness? The impolite," is, I believe, a Chinese proverb.The concept, 'dirty fellow,' which we have formed, becomes one under which we personally shrink from being classed; and so we > wash up,' and set ourselves right, at moments when our social self-conscious-ness is awakened, in a manner toward which no strictly instinctive native prompting exists.But the standard of cleanliness attained in this way is not likely to go beyond the mutual tolerance for one another of the members of the tribe, and hence may comport a good deal of actual filth.
Modesty, Shame.Whether there be an instinctive impulse to hide certain parts of the body and certain acts' is perhaps even more open to doubt than whether there be an instinct of cleanliness.Anthropologists have denied it, and in the utter shamelessness of infancy and of many savage tribes have seemed to find a good basis for their views.It must, however, be remembered that infancy proves nothing, and that, as far as sexual modesty goes, the sexual impulse itself works directly against it at times of excitement, and with reference to certain people; and that habits of immodesty contracted with those people may forever afterwards inhibit it any impulse to be modest towards them.This would account for a great deal of actual immodesty, even if an original modest impulse were there.On the other hand, the modest impulse, if it do exist, must be admitted to have a singularly ill-defined sphere of influence, both as regards the presences that call it forth, and as regards the acts to which it leads.
Ethnology shows it to have very little backbone of its own, and to follow easily fashion and example.Still, it is hard to see the ubiquity of some sort of tribute to shame, however perverted -- as where female modesty consists in covering the face alone, or immodesty in appearing before strangers unpainted -- and to believe it to have no impulsive root whatever.Now, what may the impulsive root be? I believe that, for one thing, it is shyness, the feeling of dread that unfamiliar persons, as explained above, may inspire us withal.Such persons are the original stimuli to our modesty. But the actions of modesty are quite different from the actions of shyness.
They consist of the restraint of certain bodily functions, and of the covering of certain parts; and why do such particular actions necessarily ensue?
That there may be in the human animal, as such, a > blind' and immediate automatic impulse to such restraints and coverings in respect-inspiring presences is a possibility difficult of actual disproof.
But it seems more likely, from the facts, that the actions of modesty are suggested to us in a roundabout way; and that, even more than those of cleanliness, they arise from the application in the second instance to ourselves of judgments primarily passed upon our mates.It is not easy to believe that, even among the nakedest savages, an unusual degree of cynicism and indecency in an individual should not beget a certain degree of contempt, and cheapen him in his neighbor's eyes.Human nature is sufficiently homo- geneous for us to be sure that everywhere reserve must inspire some respect, and that persons who suffer every liberty are persons whom others disregard.Not to be like such people, then, would be one of the first resolutions suggested by social self-consciousness to a.child of nature just emerging from the unreflective state.And the resolution would probably acquire effective pungency for the first time when the social self-consciousness was sharpened into a real fit of shyness by some person being present whom it was important not to disgust or displease.Public opinion would of course go on to build its positive precepts upon this germ; and, through a variety of examples and experiences, the ritual of modesty would grow, until it reached the New England pitch of sensitiveness and range, making us say stomach instead of belly, limb instead of leg, retire instead of go to bed, and forbidding us to call a female dog by name.At bottom this amounts to the admission that, though in some shape or other a natural and inevitable feature of human life, modesty need not necessarily be an instinct in the pure and simple excite-motor sense of the term.
