HUMAN AND BRUTE ACTION COMPARED 41 
the booty of beasts and birds of prey. But with stationary life, 
or at latest with the pastoral state, man at once commences an 
almost indiscriminate warfare upon all the forms of animal 
and vegetable existence around him, and as he advances in 
civilization, he gradually eradicates or transforms every spon- 
taneous product of the soil he occupies.* 
Human and Brute Action Compared. 
It is maintained by authorities as high as any known to mod- 
ern science, that the action of man upon nature, though greater 
in degree, does not differ in kind from that of wild animals. 
It is perhaps impossible to establish a radical distinction 
genere between the two classes of effects, but there is an essential 
difference between the motive of action which calls out the en- 
ergies of civilized man and the mere appetite which controls the 
life of the beast. The action of man, indeed, is frequently fol- 
lowed by unforeseen and undesired results, yet it is nevertheless 
guided by a self-conscious will aiming as often at secondary and 
remote as at immediate objects. The wild animal, on the other 
hand, acts instinctively, and, so far as we are able to perceive, 
always with a view to single and direct purposes. The back- 
woodsman and the beaver alike fell trees ; the man that he may 
convert the forest into an olive grove that will mature its fruit 
only for a succeeding generation, the beaver that he may feed 
upon the bark of the trees or use them in the construction of his 
habitation. The action of brutes upon the material world is 
slow and gradual, and usually limited, in any given case, to a 
* The difference between the relations of savage life, and of incipient 
civilization, to nature, is well seen in that part of the valley of the Missis- 
sippi which was once occupied by the mound builders and afterwards by the 
far less developed Indian tribes. When the tillers of the fields, which must 
have been cultivated to sustain the large population that once inhabited those 
regions, perished, or were driven out, the soil fell back to the normal forest 
state, and the savages who succeeded the more advanced race interfered very 
little, if at all, with the ordinary course of spontancous nature. 
