Page:Freud - Reflections on war and death.djvu/39

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WAR AND DEATH

purely external compulsion. Today people bring along a certain tendency (disposition) to transform the egotistic into social impulses as a part of their hereditary organization, which then responds to further slight incentives to complete the transformation. A part of this transformation of impulse must also be made during life. In this way the individual man is not only under the influence of his own contemporary cultural milleu but is also subject to the influences of his ancestral civilization.

If we call a person's individual capacity for transforming his egotistical impulses under the influence of love his cultural adaptability, we can say that this consists of two parts, one congenital and the other acquired, and we may add that the relation of these two to each other and to the

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