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By Root 5293 0

to itself, like the urge to preserve its own life, they can be described as its `ego' instincts. On the other hand, providing the controlling framework for its existence, are its 'ordering' instincts. These are the genetically coded instructions which enable the individual animal in every way to relate to the world around it. They tell it how to obtain its food, how to form social groups for self-protection, how to pair off with partners to reproduce, how to tend its young until they themselves are ready to mate, and so forth. From the marriage of these two complementary sets of instincts we may conclude that the overriding purpose in any form of life is not so much to survive individually as to preserve its own species. And in the animal kingdom, these two forms of instinct are inseparably integrated. But it is here that in human beings a partial separation has arisen. Their individual physical instincts remain just as automatic as those of the animals. But the controlling framework of their ordering instincts has in some way broken adrift. It is in this separation that the unique element of disintegration in human nature is to be found.

In terms of our physical needs we are just as instinctive as any other creature. The difference lies in how we seek to fulfil those needs. When a lion feels hungry, it knows only one way to satisfy that urge, which is to identify some suitable prey, track it down and kill it. The whole hunting process, from the original desire for food to the method whereby it is obtained, continues to be governed by instinct at every step. When human beings need to satisfy their hunger, so far have they emerged from the state of nature that they have developed a whole range of different ways to obtain their food, from planting seeds in the ground and waiting until they ripen into wheat to visiting a supermarket to buy a chicken frozen in a plastic bag. When a blackbird feels the urge to build a nest to shelter its young, the process is so instinctively driven that all blackbirds' nests look much the same, constructed to the same model. When men build a shelter to protect them from the elements, the results may be a mud hut or a 30-storey tower block, an igloo or the Palace of Versailles.

The difference between men and animals thus lies not in our physical instincts but in all the ways we order our relationship to the world outside us. When it comes to forming social organisations, animals have no choice. The way they relate to each other to promote their common purpose, whether in an ant colony or a herd of elephants, must always follow the same model. When human beings form communities, societies, tribes or nations, the way these are structured becomes infinitely more flexible. Their social groupings can take on a bewildering variety of forms, from a totalitarian dictatorship to a local golf club. It is true that with animal species at the higher end of the evolutionary scale, such as baboons or lions or even chickens, there may be a continual struggle between individuals to establish dominance within the group. But the patterns of this rivalry, and the general form of the social structure in which it takes place, remain strictly dictated by instinct, serving the survival of the group. Similarly, when birds of the same species compete for territory, they may display ritualised aggression towards each other; but at the end of the process, one robin's territory invariably turns out to be much the same size as the next. All this show of competition has determined, in strict accordance with genetic instructions, is how each bird may end up controlling a patch of land just large enough to supply the needs of its family. But when human beings divide up their living space, one family may end up owning a million acres while another has no more than the corner of a room in an overcrowded slum. Instinct no longer plays a part in dictating the pattern of such arrangements, because human behaviour has, in this respect, broken free from the genetic mould.

But of course this breaking adrift is far from total. And