Survival instinct

“ The fundamental instincts of all living matter are self-preservation and the propagation of the species. The instinct for self-preservation causes a plant to turn away from cold and damaging winds toward the life-giving sun; the inert mussel to withdraw within its shell; the insect to take flight; the animal to fight or to flee; and man to procure food that he may oppose starvation, to shelter himself and to provide clothes that he may avoid the dangers of excessive cold and heat, to combat death from disease by seeking medical aid, to avoid destruction by man or brute by fight or by flight. ”

“ Then the old haunting thought returned to vex me—man in his development needed the exercise of brawn, muscle, bone red-blood, violence, labor and pain and agony. Nature recognized only the survival of the fittest of any species. If a man allowed a spiritual development, intellect, gentleness, to keep him from all hard, violent action, from tremendous exertion, from fierce fight with elements and beasts, and his own kind—would he not soon degenerate as a natural physical man? Evolution was a stern inevitable seeking of nature for perfection, for the unattainable. ”

“ Of course in nature this artificial distinction does not exist. Here we find only a continuous instinct of life, a will to live, which tries to obtain the propagation of the whole race by the preservation of the individual. ”

“ The conception we have thus arrived at enables us to regard instinct as the innermost kernel, so to speak, of every living being. That this is actually the case is shown by the instincts of self-preservation and of the continuation of the species which we observe throughout creation, and by the heroic self-abandonment with which the individual will sacrifice welfare, and even life, at the bidding of instinct. ”

“ The organs themselves, and all the rest of the physical world, will, however, all the time be quite indifferent to this consequence, and would quite as cheerfully, the circumstances changed, compass the animal's destruction. In a word, survival can enter into a purely physiological discussion only as an hypothesis made by an onlooker, about the future. But the moment you bring a consciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis. No longer is it, "if survival is to occur, then so and so must brain and other organs work." ”

“ Was it that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? ”

“ It was then I think we realised what a strong instinct there was in some of us—not to struggle madly for life—but to wait for something to come to us, whether it be life or death; and not to lose our personality and become like one of the struggling shouting creatures who were by then swarming up from the lower decks and made one's heart ache. ”

“ In the spiritual as well as the physical sense only the fittest eventually can survive in the struggle for existence. There is, in fact, an absolute upward impulse to the whole human race supplied by the invariable operation of the laws of nature acting upon the common instinct of self-preservation. ”

“ It is the survival of the fittest; blow the seed, and the chaff will fly in the wind. They are the drifts, the unfitted, the people who had not the strength to keep strong; idleness, weakness, disease, all have brought them to the earth. ”

“ Yet this infinitesimal bit of life has an instinct, the instinct to save itself. Watch an amœba as fire is brought near. It immediately moves away. Its every act is regulated by this one instinct, self-preservation. ”

“ To this flight they are driven by an atavistic instinct, strong as life itself and ineradicable as death—an instinct that guides them to these coldest climes, where they will breed the strongest and most nearly perfect of young. ”

“ At this point he claims that the instinct of death will supplant the instinct of life, when the bodily mechanism approaches the natural end of normal exhaustion. He believes that men should live and maintain their usefulness for at least one hundred and twenty years. ”

“ The first is the instinct of self-preservation; the second is the instinct of reproduction; and the third pertains to the preservation of the offspring. In the last may be included the instinctive desire to preserve human life generally. ”

“ But for desire, a host of needs could not be manifested, numberless functions would remain inactive; the body would not feed itself, and would die, were it not for hunger; danger would not be fled from, but for the instinct of self-preservation ”

“ So the desire to continue alive—the "will to live"—is a natural instinct, which combines with the belief in persistent disembodied spirits and, no doubt, with many other elements, to develop the basic conception of some kind of an immortal existence. ”

“ And this close attention and well-directed effort, which are trained in the playful output of energy, are just the mental qualities which will stand the animal in good stead when the real incidence of life’s struggle comes upon it, when the reward of success is survival and the penalty of failure elimination. ”

“ Life pursuing life and in its turn pursued by death, presses to the snow line of the possible, and every form of life, of instinct, thought and action is fixed and determined by conditions, by countless antecedent and co-existing facts. ”

“ Later on we observed the spirit of courage in operation; evolving animals really developed a crude form of protective self-consciousness. Subsequent to the appearance of the mammalian groups, we beheld the spirit of knowledge manifesting itself in increased measure. And the evolution of the higher mammals brought the function of the spirit of counsel, with the resulting growth of the herd instinct and the beginnings of primitive social development. ”

“ Granting that man could, in a state of absolute savagery, and before he had discovered the use of fire or of tools, depend upon instinct alone, and in so doing live healthily, cannot what yet remains of instinct be of some value among civilized beings? ”

“ Nature implants with life the instinct of self-help, perpetual struggle to be, to resist opposition, to attain to freedom, to attain to a mastery and the security of a permanent, self-defended being; and to each creature these objects are made so dear that it risks its life continually in the struggle for these ends. ”

“ A very common way of talking about these admirably definite tendencies to act is by naming abstractly the purpose they subserve, such as self-preservation, or defence, or care for eggs and young—and saying the animal has an instinctive fear of death or love of life, or that she has an instinct of self-preservation, or an instinct of maternity and the like. ”

“ And born with the instinct of soul is the instinct that leads the soul from the seen to the unseen, from time to eternity, from the torrent that foams towards the Ocean of Death, to the source of its stream, far aloft from the Ocean. ”

“ These discoveries show the orderly processes of survival of the fittest and of evolution developing successive generations of man with refined physical and mental qualities, ultimately producing modern man. ”

“ The animal nature and the lower forms of will creatures do not progress favorably in environmental ease. Problematic situations, coupled with exertion stimuli, conspire to produce those activities of mind, soul, and spirit which contribute mightily to the achievement of worthy goals of mortal progression and to the attainment of higher levels of spirit destiny. ”

“ What we call instinct is the voice of past generations reverberating like a distant echo in the cells of the nervous system. We feel the breath, the advice, the experience of all men, from those who lived on acorns and struggled with the wild beasts, dying naked in the forests, down to the virtue and toil of our father, to the fear and love of our mother. ”

“ Chalmers Mitchell.
I would venture to extend the range of the term 'soul' down to a very large denominator,—to cases in which the magnitude of the fraction becomes excessively minute,—and tentatively admit to the possibility of [ 336] survival, though not individual survival, every form of life. As to Individuality and Personality—they can only survive where they already exist; when they really exist they persist; but bare survival, as an alternative to improbable extinction, may be widespread.
Matter forms an instrument, a means of manifestation, but it need not be the only one possible. ”

“ Thus we see some of them, the ephemerae, lose at that moment the instinct of life and the instinct of self-preservation. They allow themselves to be approached, taken, and seized, and make no effort at flight. ”

“ Who can believe, for example, that a new-born baby is aware of the necessity of food for preserving life? Or that insects, in laying eggs, are concerned for the preservation of their species? The essence of instinct, one might say, is that it provides a mechanism for acting without foresight in a manner which is usually advantageous biologically. ”

“ But selfhood of survival value, selfhood that can transcend the experience of death, is only evolved by establishing a potential transfer of the seat of the identity of the evolving personality from the transient life vehicle—the material body—to the more enduring and immortal nature of the morontia soul and on beyond to those levels whereon the soul becomes infused with, and eventually attains the status of, spirit reality. ”

“ I was saying that which survives is proved worthy of survival, as of a man and a shark, or of Athens and Macedonia, or in many other ways. Now the thruppenny bit, having survived to our own time, has so proved itself in that test, and upon this all men of science are agreed. ”

“ Myers says: “The question of the survival of man is a branch of experimental psychology. Is there, or is there not, evidence in the actual observed phenomena of automatism, apparitions and the like, for a transcendental energy in living men, or for an influence emanating from personalities which have overpassed the tomb? ”

“ But the energies which express themselves in their pursuit—energies vital, primordial, and necessary even to man's physical survival—have all been evolved under the same stress of adaptation of the human creature to its surroundings ”

“ The will-to-live, the struggle for survival, the élan vital, libido, etc., are only new names given to the impelling forces of the growth-urge in its higher stages; but these have become types and symbols, if a bit anthropomorphic, of all the more basal and earlier processes by which the homogeneous tends to differentiate itself. Thus we may conceive the universe as being from the first in labor to produce life. Everything that lives hungers to do so more intensely and as for man “’tis life of which our nerves are scant, more life and fuller—that we want.” ”

“ Such ‘natural laws’ as ‘survival of the fittest’ for animals, which is the ‘survival of the fittest in space,’ result in fight, or the survival of the strongest; whereas such a law to be a natural law for humans, must be in the human dimension which obviously would be the ‘Survival of the fittest in time,’ resulting in the survival of the best. ”

“ If now we carefully examine the Phenomena around us, we make the extraordinary discovery that this power to influence is the very basis of survival and of progress throughout the universe. In the organic world all Nature seems to be praying in one form or another, and only those that pray with efficacy, based upon the above two conditions, survive in the struggle for existence. ”

“ The life of the mind, although supremely excellent in itself, cannot bring health into the life of instinct, except when it results in a not too difficult outlet for the instinct of creation. In other cases it is, as a rule, too widely separated from instinct, too detached, too destitute of inward growth, to afford either a vehicle for instinct or a means of subtilizing and refining it. ”

“ To this I would answer that, so far as my observation tells me, the soul will always find some shape and some material wherein to build, or to restore, the shelters needed in its moments of weariness and sorrow, there to await the consolation which no creed seems to bring without the supreme aid of time. On the other hand, that the instinctive part of our nature, when it is truly instinctive, can surely be trusted to keep itself alive in the face of the (alas!) inevitably feeble imperatives of such new-comers as Reason and Intelligence. ”

“ This has now been fully shown, inasmuch as we have clearly seen that the importance of the struggle for existence, and consequent survival of the fittest, arises just because survival of the fittest is a form, and a very stringent form, of isolation ”

“ I would even venture to urge that, ever since the grant to living creatures of free will, there must be, in some sense or other, a real element of contingency,—that there is no dulness about it, even to the Deity, but a constant and aspiring Effort.
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Let us trust our experience in this also. The Universe is a flux, it is a becoming, it is a progress. Evolution is a reality. True and not imaginary progress is possible. Effort is not a sham. Existence is a true adventure. There is a real risk. ”

“ For more than five years now you've been thwarting life, rendering barren all the vast time, the appalling agony, the ceaseless struggle, it has cost Nature to produce you—with your chance to pass on the flame of life. ”