As the race has found through long experience that monogamy is to be preferred to promiscuous mating; that the highest interests of life are fostered by loyalty to the institution of the family; that the careful rearing of several children rather than the mere production of many is in the long run to be desired; and that a single standard of morality is practicable; so society has established for its members a standard which is in direct opposition to the immeasurable urge of the past.  To make matters worse, there have at the same time grown up in many communities a standard of living and an economic competition which still further limit the size of the family and the satisfaction of the reproductive impulse.

=The Perpetual Feud.= There thus arises the strategic struggle between that which the race has found good in the past and that which the race finds good in the present.  As the older race-experience is laid in they body and built into the very fiber of the individual, inherited as an innate impulse, it has become an integral part of himself, an individual need rather than a social one.  On the other hand, man has, as another innate part of his being, the desire to go with the herd, to conform to the standards of his fellows, to be what he has learned society wants him to be.  Hence the struggle, insistent, ever more pressing, between two sets of desires within the man himself; the feud between the past and the present, between the natural and the social, between the selfish and the ideal.  On one side, there is the demand for instinctive satisfaction; on the other, for moral control; on one side the demand for pleasure; on the other, the demands of reality.[13]

[Footnote 13:  “All the burdens of men or society are caused by the inadequacies in the association of primal animal emotions with those mental powers which have been so rapidly developed in man-kind.”—­Shaler quoted by Hinkle:  Introduction to Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious.]

Two factors intensify the conflict.  In the first place, the older habits have the head start.  Compared with the almost limitless extent of our past history, our desire for the control of the instincts is very new indeed.  It requires the long look and the right perspective to understand how very lately we have entered into our new conditions and how old a habit we are trying to break.  In the second place, the larger part of the stimulus comes from within the body itself.  When studying the other instincts, we saw that the best way to control was to refuse to stimulate when the situation was not suitable for discharge.  But with the organically aroused sex-instinct there is no such power of choice.  We may fan the flame by the thoughts we think or the environment we seek, or we may smother the flame until it is out of sight, but we cannot extinguish it by any act of ours.  The issue has always been too important to be left to the individual.  The stimulation comes, primarily, not by way of the mind but by way of the body.  With this instinct we cannot “stop before we begin,” because Nature has taken the matter out of our hands and begins for us.