Definition of "self-preservative" []

• Of or pertaining to self-preservation.

The Century Dictionary (Public Domain)

• "Even a libertarian society would have to have in place some mechanisms to encourage conformity, since no society exists without such a self-preservative mechanism."
• "Thus there are both desirable and undesirable societal passions and desirable and undesirable self-preservative passions."
• "All self-preservative passions, by contrast, “turn” on pain, that is, each has either pain or its felt absence of pain as a constituent (Burke 1990, 37)."