86 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



races would speedily became extinct. Habitations must be construct- 

 ed ; food must be procured by complex contrivances of nets and strata- 

 gems ; supplies must be stored up against an approaching winter ; 

 elaborate provision must be made for the birth and nurture of offspring. 

 Man is endowed with Intellect, which fully answers all these exigen- 

 cies. The uniformity of nature's laws makes the observation of the 

 past a mirror which images the future ; and the same generalization of 

 experience through the power of Thought enables him to combine the 

 necessary means of satisfying the wants thus foreseen. The gift of 

 language, which, as has been shown, is a consequence of the endow- 

 ment of Thought, multipUes indefinitely the instructive power of indi- 

 vidual experience, by making it virtually coextensive with the multi- 

 plied and various experience of the whole race. Instruction is the 

 communication of other people's experience and the results of their 

 ingenuity, and Intellect is entirely dependent upon instruction and per- 

 sonal observation. Without their aid, or without the uniformity of 

 nature's laws, which lends them all their efficiency, it would be power- 

 less as a means of providing for the future. 



Instinct is an impulse, conceived without instruction and prior to all 

 experience, to perform certain acts, which, in themselves considered, are 

 not immediately agreeable to the agent, but are generally laborious and 

 even painful, and which are useful only as means for some future end, 

 this end being commonly one of pre-eminent importance or necessity, 

 either for the preservation of the animal's own life or the continuance 

 of its species. Instinct appeal's in the accomplishment of a complex 

 act, (the building of a nest, net, or cell, or the capture of prey 

 by a stratagem,) which man certainly could not perform without 

 Thought, or Intellect properly so called ; that is, without experience or 

 instruction, the observation of effects, the induction of a rule or law 

 from them, and the consequent choice and adaptation of means to ends. 

 It has been said that man is not more intelligent, but otherwise intelli- 

 gent, than the lower animals. This is hardly correct, for animals, prop- 

 erly speaking, are not intelligent at all. As has been shown, they are 

 incapable of Thought. Instinct appears in them as a substitute for 

 Intellect, not as a lower degree of it. Both the human and the brute 

 creation have Intuitions ; but these Intuitions being wholly insufficient 

 to answer all the exigencies of either, they are supplemented, in the 

 one case, by Thought acting through experience, and in the other, by 

 Instinct, which is altogether independent of experience. Within its 



