6 An Inquiry respecting 



posing to certain ends the conscious natures of brutes ; which na- 

 tures, if we suppose them destitute of moral and intellectual con* 

 sciousness, have need of the operation of such powers to direct 

 them. The phoenomena of brute action, indeed, are inexplicable 

 upon any other grounds ; but these once admitted, there appears 

 to be nothing in the whole circle of instinctive operations which 

 may not be satisfactorily accounted for. I will not even venture a 

 suggestion as to the nature of the intermediate superior powers here 

 alluded to; but their agency, I repeat, is plainly manifest in the 

 conduct of brutes. 



As an instance illustrative of this remark, I need only mention 

 the surprising attention of the neuter class of most of those insects 

 which live in society, in the education of the young ; an office for 

 which it would naturally be supposed they would be wholly unfitted 

 by the privation of the sexual character, and the consequent 

 absence of the parental stimulus.* But the end is to he ac- 

 complished ; and the animal is supplied with an inclination to 

 accomplish it, by which it is led to the means ; being impelled 

 thereto by a moral and intellectual energy operating above its own 

 consciousness, and which it would in vain endeavour to estimate j 

 although with respect to its own immediate voluntary powers it 

 may be in perfect freedom, and even have, as indeed it unques- 

 tionably has, a subordinate consciousness of the acts it performs, 

 accompanied with a sensation of delight, as a consequence of their 

 performance. Certain it is, from the wondrous indications of 

 moral design, intellect, and science, discoverable in the actions of 

 brute animals, that we must either suppose them gifted with innate 

 conscious, moral, intellectual, and scientific faculties, and thus 

 with those very powers which form the distinguishing character- 

 istics of human rationality, which is however totally at variance 

 with our observation of their general nature; — or we must allow 

 them to possess only a subordinate consciousness and discrimina- 

 tion determinable to natural objects ; and overruled and directed 

 by powers or agencies operating in them above the sphere or stream 

 of their own proper consciousness, and which powers or agencies 

 must be of a moral, intellectual, and scientific order: thus that brutes 

 * Kiihy ami Spetia'e's Entomol. vol. i, |>. 863. 



