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



Being is perfectly fulfilled in following it. This it is Avliicli gives its 

 restfulness to Nature, Avhose abodes are indeed what Wadsworth calls 

 them— 



" Abodes in which Self-disturbance hath no part." 



On the other hand the double Personality, the presence of "Two 

 Voices," is never wholly wanting even in the most degi-aded of human 

 beings — their thoughts everywhere "accusing or else' excusing one 

 anothei'." 



Knowing, therefore, in ourselves both these kinds of operation, we 

 can measure the difference between them, and we can thoroughly 

 understand how animals may be able to do all that they actually per- 

 form, without ever passing through the processes of argumentation by 

 which we reach the conclusions of conscious reason and of moral obli- 

 gation. Moreover, seeing and feeling the difference, we can see and 

 feel the relations which obtain between the two classes of mental work. 

 The plain truth is, that the higher and more complicated \VH)rk is done, 

 and can cftily be done, with the material supplied by the lower and 

 simpler tools. Nay, more, the very highest and most aspiring mental 

 processes rest upon the lower, as a building rests upon its foundation- 

 stones. They are like the rude but massive substructions fi'om which 

 some great Temple springs. Not only is the impulse, the disposition 

 and the ability to reason as purely intuitive and congenital in JMan as 

 the disposition to eat, but the fundamental axioms on which all reason- 

 ing rests are, and can only be, intuitively perceived. This, indeed, 

 is the essential character of all the axioms or self-evident propositions 

 which are the basis of reasoning, that the truth of them is perceived 

 by an act of apprehension, which, if it depends on any process, depends 

 on a process unconscious, involuntary, and purely automatic. But this 

 is the definition, the only definition, of instinct or intuition. All con- 

 scious reasoning thus starts from the data which this great faculty sup- 

 plies; and all our trust and confidence in the results of reasoning must 

 depend on our trust and confidence in the adjusted harmony which has 

 been established between instincts and the truths of Nature. Not 

 only is the idea of mechanjsm consistent with this confidence, but it is 

 insejiarable from it. No firmer ground for that cofidence can be given 

 us in thought then this conception, — that as the eye of sense is a mech- 

 anism specially adjusted to receive the light of heaven, so is the mental 

 eye a mechanism sj^ecially adjusted to perceive those realities which 

 are in the nature of necessary and eternal truth. Moreover, the same 

 conception helps us to understand the real nature of those limitations 

 upon our faculties which curtail their range, and which yet, in a sense, 



