LJ 
120 ON THE LATEST FORM OF THE DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 
man also has both propensities and appetites which need not the promptings of intel- 
lect, but are awakened before reason is born in him.  Tastes, smells, and sounds are 
pleasant or odious to him as a matter of original constitution, and not because his ` 
reason tells him that these ought to be sought, and those to be avoided. 
This is not an arbitrary definition or limitation of the meaning of the word instinct ; 
for if, as Mr. Darwin says, human reason is to be developed out of the brute's endow- 
ments, be these what they may, — if man is the son of a monkey, and the grandson of 
a horse, and the remote descendant of an oyster, — then reason must grow out of some- 
thing which has at least some characteristic of reason, or which does the work of 
reason; and not from something which even now, in man, has no resemblance to in- 
tellect properly so called, and no dependence upon it, and which appears fully even 
in an idiot. Tell me that reason has been developed out of instinct as it has now been 
defined, and at least I know what you mean; but to say that it has been evolved from 
an appetite or a propensity, is as incomprehensible as to allege that an idea has been 
developed out of a football. No conceivable variation of a football will approximate 
it to reason. Mr. Darwin’s supposed cases of incipient, altered, or lost instincts are, at 
best, only instances of the development or disappearance of blind impulses or appe- 
tites, which relate only to the selection of ends to be obtained, and not to devising new 
means, or improving old ones, of obtaining them. He has not adduced « one case of the 
variation of instinct properly so called. 
Any form of the Development Theory rests ultimately. upon the assumption, that 
the origin of species by a direct act of creation is inconceivable, or at best grossly im- 
probable. Mr. Darwin, as already mentioned, speaks with wonder of those who are 
“no more startled at a miraculous act of creation than at an ordinary birth.” And 
Professor Parsons, in a communication upon the same subject to this Academy, declared 
that, whatever difficulties might impede the reception of the transmutation hypothesis, 
“T should accept them all unhesitatingly, rather than the notion that the first horse, 
or dog, or eagle, or whale flashed into being out of nothingness, or out of a mass 
of inorganic elements which had been drawn together in due proportion for that 
purpose." 
In opposition to this view, it is here maintained that a direct act of creation is no 
more inconceivable, and not inconceivable in any other sense, than an ordinary birth. 
It excites more wonder, it is true; but only because it is less frequent, or because it is 
believed to take place more abruptly. A new individual — a new being — is the result 
in either case; but to assert that the beginning of this new existence is more explicable 
