In every lunatic asylum we find the collecting instinct developing itself in an equally absurd way.Certain patients will spend all their time picking pins from the floor and hoarding them.Others collect bits of thread, buttons, or rags, and prize them exceedingly.Now, 'the Miser' par excellence of the popular imagination and of melodrama, the monster of squalor and misanthropy, is simply one of these mentally deranged persons.His intellect may in many matters be clear, but his instincts, especially that of ownership, are insane, and their insanity has no more to do with the association of ideas than with the precession of the equinoxes.As a matter of fact his hoarding usually is directed to money; but it also includes almost anything besides.Lately in a Massachusetts town there died a miser who principally hoarded newspapers.These had ended by so filling all the rooms of his good-sized house from floor to ceiling that his living-space was restricted to a few narrow channels between them.Even as I write, the morning paper gives an account of the emptying of a miser's den in Boston by the City Board of Health.What the owner hoarded is thus described:
A He gathered old newspapers, wrapping-paper, incapacitated umbrellas, canes, pieces of common wire, cast-off clothing, empty barrels, pieces of iron, old bones, battered tin-ware, fractured pots, and bushels of such miscellany as is to be found only at the city 'dump.' The empty barrels were filled, shelves were filled, every hole and corner was filled, and in order to make more storage-room, 'the hermit' covered his store-room with a network of ropes, and hung the ropes as full as they could hold of his curious collections.There was nothing one could think of that wasn't in that room.As a wood-sawyer, the old man had never thrown away a saw-blade or a wood-buck.The bucks were rheumatic and couldn't stand up, and the saw-blades were worn down to almost nothing in the middle.Some had been actually worn in two, but the ends were carefully saved and stored away.As a coal-heaver, the old man had never cast of a worn-out basket, and there were dozens of the remains of the old things, patched up with canvas and rope-yarns, in the store-room.There were at least two dozen old hats, fur, cloth, silk, and straw," etc.
Of course there may be a great many 'associations of ideas' in the miser's mind about the things he hoards.He is a thinking being, and must associate things; but, without an entirely blind impulse in this direction behind all his ideas, such practical results could never be reached.
Kleptomania , as it is called, is an uncontrollable impulse to appropriate, occurring in persons whose 'associations of ideas' would naturally all be of a counteracting sort.
Kleptomaniacs often promptly restore, or permit to be re-stored, what they have taken; so the impulse need not be to keep, but only to take.
But elsewhere hoarding complicates the result.A gentleman, with whose case I am acquainted, was discovered, after his death, to have a hoard in his barn of all sorts of articles, mainly of a trumpery sort, but including pieces of silver which he had stolen from his own dining-room, and utensils which he had stolen from his own kitchen, and for which he had afterward bought substitutes with his own money.
Constructiveness is as genuine and irresistible an instinct in man as in the bee or the beaver.Whatever things are plastic to his hands, those things he must remodel into shapes of his own, and the result of the remodeling, however useless it may be, gives him more pleasure than the original thing.The mania of young children for breaking and pulling apart whatever is given them is more often the expression of a rudimentary constructive impulse than of a, destructive one.'Blocks' are the playthings of which they are least apt to tire.Clothes, weapons, tools, habitations, and works of art are the result of the discoveries to which the plastic instinct leads, each individual starting where his forerunners left off, and tradition preserving all that once is gained.Clothing, where not necessitated by cold, is nothing but a sort of attempt to re-model the human body itself -- an attempt still better shown in the various tattooings, tooth-filings, scarrings, and other mutilations that are practised by savage tribes.As for habitation, there can be no doubt that the instinct to seek a sheltered nook, open only on one side, into which he may retire and be safe, is in man quite as specific as the instinct of birds to build a nest.It is not necessarily in the shape of a shelter from wet and cold that the need comes before him, but he feels less exposed and more at home when not altogether uninclosed than when lying all abroad.Of course the utilitarian origin of this instinct is obvious.But to stick to bare facts at present and not to trace origins, we must admit that this instinct now exists, and probably always has existed, since man was man.Habits of the most complicated kind are reared upon it.But even in the midst of these habits we see the blind instinct cropping out; as, for example, in the fact that we feign a shelter within a, shelter, by backing up beds in rooms with their heads against the wall, and never lying in them the other way -- just as dogs prefer to get cinder or upon some piece of furniture to sleep, instead of lying in the middle of the room.The first habitations were caves and leafy grottoes, bettered by the bends; and we see children to-day, when playing in wild places, take the greatest delight in discovering and appropriating such retreats and 'playing house' there.
Play.The impulse to play in special ways is certainly instinctive.
