SiO On Animal Instinct: in its Relation to the Mind of Man. 



and the most complicated anticipations, it is certain that the prevision 

 involved is a prevision which is not in the animals themselves. They 

 appear to be, and beyond all doubt really are, guided by some simple 

 appetite, by an odor or a taste, and, in all probability, they have gen- 

 erally as little consciousness of the ends to be subserved as the suck- 

 ling has of the processes of nutrition. The path along which they walk 

 is a path which they did not engineer. It is a path made for them, 

 and they simply follow it. But the propensities and tastes and feel- 

 ings which make them follow it, and the rightness of its direction 

 towards the ends to be attained, do constitute an adjustment which 

 may correctly be called mechanical, and is part of a unity which binds 

 together the whole world, of life, and the whole inorganic world on 

 which living things depend. 



Surely, then, it would be a strange object of ambition to try to think 

 that we are not included in this vast system of adjustment ; that our 

 nobler faculties have no share in the secure and wonderful guarantee 

 which it affords for the truthfulness of all mental gifts. It is well that 

 we should place a high estimate on the superiorities of the powers 

 which we possess ; and that the distinction, with all its consequences, 

 between self-conscious reason and the comparatively simple perceptions 

 of the beasts, should be ever kept in view. But it is not well that we 

 should omit from that estimate a common element of immense import- 

 ance which belongs to both, and the value of which becomes immeas- 

 urably greater in its connection with our special gifts. That element 

 is the element of adjustmeut-^the element which suggest the idea of an 

 apparatus — the element which constitutes all our higher faculties — the 

 index and the result of a pre-adjusted harmony. In the light of this 

 conception we can see a new meaning in our " place in Nature;" that 

 place which, so far as our bodily organs are concerned, assigns to us 

 simply a front rank among the creatures which are endowed with life. 

 It is in virtue of that place and association that we may be best 

 assured that our special gifts have the same relation to the higher real- 

 ities of nature which the lower faculties of the beasts have to the lower 

 realities of the physical world. Whatever we have that is peculiar to 

 ourselves is built up on the same firm foundation on which all animal* 

 instinct rests. It is often said that we can never really know what 

 unreasoning instinct is, because we can never enter into an animal 

 mind, and see what is woi-king there. Men are so apt to be arrogant 

 in philosophy that it seems almost wrong to deprecate even any semb- 

 lance of the consciousness of ignorance. But it were much to be 

 desired that the modesty of philosophers would come in the right pla- 

 ces. I hold that we can know, and can almost thoroughly understand. 



