THE RELATION BETWEEN STATICS AND DYNAMICS 55 
and the maladjustments which result are a part of the dynamic 
theory of human nature. 
And human nature is paradoxical. The pleasure we take 
in many activities is not the reason why we want to do these 
things: the reason goes back to our inborn equipment of impulses 
and the particular forms which our environment has caused 
them to take; and pleasure is apparently a secondary and 
reinforcing factor, strengthening certain types of activity which 
have survival-value, and hence having survival-value itself. 
Biologically, it is presumably a means to survival, and justified 
on that ground and to that extent only. Our impulses are 
sprung from primitive nature; and primitive nature is lavish 
of life, of death, of motives and of suffering. This fact of nature 
is constantly at war with our recently-developed ideal of 
economy. In particular, the strength of those desires which 
have their roots in the primitive, is adapted to conditions of 
struggle for existence in which wants could not be satiated, or 
else the world was saved from the results which would follow 
satiation under civilized conditions. Hunger could not be per- 
manently satisfied; the fighting impulse could not render itself 
obsolete in a pax Romana; and the particularly lavish repro- 
ductive instinct could afford to run riot because nature employed, 
for the ends of biological progress, a method of keeping down 
the increase which, from the standpoint of civilized man, is 
wholly intolerable.® Now we save the weak, outlaw the fighting 
impulse (until a war occurs) and are free to overeat habitually. 
Thus the power to gratify wants brings with it new conditions, 
some of which are even dangerous, unless we can find substitutes 
for the checks imposed by primitive nature. 
Reason itself is paradoxical when it takes the form of 
“rationalizing” or evolving ostensible motives for actions, where 
the real motive is one which civilized standards deem less 
respectable, or one which might even have to be suppressed 
unless it could be successfully disguised. Here means and ends 
become confused, and mere introspection cannot extricate them 
with any certainty. “Rational” weighing of values is also 
paradoxical in that it is irrational to pursue it to the point of 
perfection. To do so under modern conditions would leave no 
* Even primitive men, however, exhibit numerous institutions the nat- 
ural effect of which would be to keep down the birth rate.