Thinking and doing / by Harry Roberts.

  • Harry Roberts
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Thinking and doing / by Harry Roberts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    material circumstances. Stupid and unimaginative children sometimes satisfy this appetite by bullying boys or girls who are weaker than themselves; whilst vulgar men and women are apt to insult or meanly exploit other men and women who happen, through poverty or some other circumstance, to be dependent on them. People with finer spirit satisfy their appetite for mastery by painting beautiful pictures, or by excelling in some sport or branch of athletics, or by rendering some outstanding ser- vice to their countrymen or neighbours. We have other important appetites, less clearly defined, such as that for harmony or unity; but those I have enumerated will serve for our present purpose. All our instinctive trends lead towards the grati- fication of appetites. This does not mean that the animal or the child or the man, who is impelled to act in a certain way because of an instinctive urge, is consciously seeking the satisfaction of a primitive appetite. Very often, indeed, activities essentially instinctive have no present relation to the gratifica- tion of the appetite to which the original instinct ministered. Caged birds who have not had, and will not have, any opportunity of mating and pro- ducing young, instinctively build nests in the spring, and make all sorts of preparations for the rearing of a family. Squirrels in captivity, although they have their food brought to them daily all the year round, instinctively hide a store of nuts in the autumn, just as though they were up against all the difficulties of a natural life. Millionaires who have only to send to the stores for anything they want, whenever they want it, make elaborate collec-
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