t, a part of the effort to
reaccommodate, since it is a physiological preparation for action
appropriate to the type of situation in question.[242] The strain upon
the attention, the affective bodily condition, and the motor activity
appear usually in the same connection, and, from the standpoint
of biological design, the action concluding the series of bodily
activities is of advantage to the organism.

In animal life the situation is simple. Whether the animal decides to
fight for it or to run for it, he has at any rate two plain courses
before him, and the relation between his emotional states and the
type of situation is rather definitely fixed racially, and relatively
constant. Even in the associated life of animals the type of reaction
is not much changed, and is here also instinctively fixed. But in
mankind the instinctive life is overshadowed or rivaled by the freedom
of initiative secured through an extraordinary development of the
power of inhibition and of associative memory, while, at the same
time, this freedom of choice is hindered and checked by the presence
of others. The social life of mankind brings out a thousand situations
unprovided for in the instincts and unanticipated in consciousness.
In the midst, then, of a situation relatively new in race experience,
where advantage is still the all-important consideration, and where
this can no longer be secured either by fighting or running, but by
the good opinion of one's fellows as well, we may look for some new
strains upon the attention and some emotions not common to animal
life.

I do not think we can entirely understand the nature of these
emotional expressions in the race unless we realize that man is, in
his savage as well as his civilized state, enormously sensitive to the
opinion of others.[243] The longing of the Creek youth to "bring in
hair" and be counted a man; the passion of the Dyak of Borneo for
heads, and the recklessness of the modern soldier, "seeking the bubble
reputation at the cannon's mouth;" the alleged action of the young
women of Kansas in taking a vow to marry no man who had not been to
the Philippine war, and of the ladies of Havana, during the rebellion
against Spain, in sending a chemise to a young man who stayed at home,
with the suggestion that he wear it until he went to the field--all
indicate that the opinion of one's fellows is at least as powerful a
stimulus as any found in nature. To the student of ethnology no po