130 ᾿ REPORT—1850. | 
Of the Influences of Man's Instinct on his Intellectual and Moral Powers, 
i.e. his Mental Functions. By Ricuarv Fow.uer, M.D., F.R.S. 
The body of an animal is the mortal coil, or rather congeries of coils, through which 
its vital and mental forces act. Each of these coils has an instinctive appetite for its 
appropriate object, the wants, appetites, emotions and passions, both of man and ani- 
mals inferior to man, though instinctive and susceptible of control by the mind, and | 
subject to the direct influence of the physical forces, gravitation, motion, chemical 
affinities, heat, light, electricity, and magnetism. 
Now the most marked difference between man and other animals seems to be, that 
man has to contrive the means by which his ends are to be attained, whereas to 
animals the means of gratifying their instincts, wants, or appetites are instinctive. 
The spider requires no previous teaching to weave its web, and the Chinese fish (see 
* Bell on the Hand’) with unerring aim brings down a fly from some feet in the air 
with a drop of the water in which it swims. Shells, scales, fur, and feathers defend 
them from the elements, and more perceptive organs of sense are given to all for de- 
tection and pursuit of their prey. Man, urged by his wants to devise means for their 
gratification, is thus schooled and impelled to the cultivation and progressive im- 
provement of both his intellectual and moral faculties, for the obstacles to be removed 
force on him the control of his own propensities and the conciliation of the aid of 
his fellow man. Our wants therefore may not be considered an evil, but rather as 
the Pertinens Interrogatio, suggesting search, and are thus the sources of all the arts 
and of a large portion of the sciences by which human life is gladdened, sustained, 
and informed. 
The author shortly adverted to Outness, or the instinctive belief that all the objects 
with which we are surrounded are separated from us by apparent distances in space; 
while it is now known that this belief is not more than an instinctive inference (sus- 
tained indeed by concurrence of periodical returns of pheenomena at the exact times 
calculated and perspective sketches of objects at different distances) from subjective 
sensation ; for even of the forces by which all changes in objects and their relations to 
each other are affected, the mind has very direct perception; that this is really so, 
light and heat may be adduced as instances. 
Of the travellers who meet at the haif-way hut on the Andes, those who have de- 
scended feel over-heated, while those who are ascending complain of cold, though 
the actual temperature, as measured. by the thermometer, is the same to both parties. 
z Analogous to this is light, as it is seen by persons in the passages to and from a 
jorama. 
The hand that has been in hot water feels cold, while the other just out of cold 
water feels warm, when both are dipped into the mixture of the hot and cold water. 
Again, all the physical forces are felt as different while passing in or out of our 
bodies, for instance, gravitation and motion, while ascending or descending in a 
swing; of heat and light, the instances given above may suffice. The operations of a 
surgeon inflict like wounds, whether pure air or chloroform has been respired; but 
how different to the feelings of the patient are these changes of the chemical affinities 
when continued or obstructed; buoyancy when pure air has access to the blood, faint- 
ness when chloroform is substituted! Is it not then demonstrable that what is per- 
ceived by the mind directly is not the objective excitors, but the subjective effects, 
notwithstanding our instinctive belief of the contrary? 
On the still debatable subject of innate ideas, the author doubted whether we have 
any other than the mind’s perception of our functional appetites in the various organs 
of the body (accompanied as they are with corresponding changes in the passage of 
the blood through the heart), and of the impressions made by the physical forees in- 
cessantly exciting all our sensational structures; hence every antecedent sensation is 
intuitively inferred to be the cause of the propensity felt for any action or object of 
desire, present or absent; for to be doing, in order to acquire something, is an inces- 
sant propensity in all animals. 
