332 Organic Nature's Riddle 



is in man a further development of instinct, peculiar to him, 

 and serving to bridge over the gulf between mere intelhgent 

 animal faculty and distinctly human reflective intellectual 

 activity. Such special intellectual instinct is that which 

 impels man to the external manifestation by voice or gesture 

 of the mental abstractions which his intellect spontaneously 

 forms, and which are not formed by the lower animals, which 

 give no evidence of this power of abstraction. Language 

 could never have been deliberately invented nor have arisen 

 by a mere accidental individual variation, for vocal and 

 gesture signs are essentially conventional, and require more 

 or less comprehension on the part of those to whom they 

 are addressed as well as on the part of those who use them. 

 Analogous considerations apply to the first beginnings of 

 what cannot be reckoned as merely instinctive activities, 

 but the origins of which must have been akin to instincts. 

 I refer to the beginnings of literature, art, science, and 

 poHtics, which were never deliberately invented. Even men 

 who supposed they were inventing and constructing a certain 

 new order of things with full purpose and much intelligence, 

 have really been all the time so dominated by influences 

 beyond their consciousness, that they really evolved some- 

 thing very diiferent from what they supposed or intended. 

 This fact has been most instructively shown by De Tocqueville 

 and Taine with respect to the men who promoted and carried 

 through the great French Revolution. So much, then, for 

 man's highest instinctive powers : but our argument has no 

 need to refer to them, for a consideration of man's lowest 

 instinctive poAvers alone suffices to show that they cannot 

 be due to ' natural selection,' even when aided by ' lapsed 

 intelligence.' Can it be for a moment seriously maintained 

 that such actions of the infant as those of the sucking, 

 deglutition, and defecation, or the sexual instincts of later 

 life, ever arose through the accidental conservation of hap- 



