22 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



image, or its details, that is ever improved by experience 

 in any healthy eye, but it is the great perceptive faculty 

 of Consciousness that improves by experience in its know- 

 ledge and appreciation of the eye's images. It is not 

 therefore the EYE, but the CONSCIOUSNESS, that is educated 

 by experience. A few analogous facts of comparative 

 science will render this very clear. Some animals are 

 endued with perfect sight from their first contact with 

 light. The sight of a chicken is perfect as soon as it 

 chips the shell. But we have no reason to know or believe 

 that the eye of a chicken is more organically matured or 

 perfect at that age than the eye of a new-born child. Its 

 anatomical structure is in nothing that we can perceive 

 more efficient or more complete. The retina in a child is 

 a perfect mirror, and all perfect mirrors give at all times 

 perfect images. But then a chicken's consciousness is 

 given it to perceive and act ; a child's consciousness is 

 given it to perceive and reflect ; and an acting conscious- 

 ness is more easily educated than a reflecting conscious- 

 ness. Hence the difference between instinct and thought. 

 A chicken's perceptions are enough for its guidance. A 

 child is guided by its reflections, and hence its reflections 

 have to be educated and allied to its perceptions, for its 

 guiding power is not in, but separate and apart from 

 its perceptions. A chicken's consciousness is perfect at 

 once within the whole range of its faculties, for its con- 

 sciousness is merely perceptive, and all its faculties are 

 perfect in their impressions. A child's consciousness is 

 reflective, and is not perfect at once, from want of elements 

 of knowledge to enable it to reflect, and it therefore grows 

 by means of knowledge and experience. Hence the 

 superiority, in point of immediate accuracy, of instinct 

 over reason. A chicken will not run into water unless 

 it be of the aquatic species, because it is conscious of 

 danger ; a duckling, though hatched by a hen, will, because 



