THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 187 



times exceeding vividness and force; and from his 

 style on such occasions it is to be inferred, that the 

 ganglia of this Apostle of the Understanding are some- 

 times the seat of a nascent poetic thrill. 



It is a fact of supreme importance that actions, the 

 performance of which at first requires even painful 

 effort and deliberation, may, by habit, be rendered auto- 

 matic. Witness the slow learning of its letters by a 

 child, and the subsequent facility of reading in a man, 

 when each group of letters which forms a word is in- 

 stantly, and without effort, fused to a single perception. 

 Instance the billiard-player, whose muscles of hand and 

 eye, when he reaches the perfection of his art, are un- 

 consciously co-ordinated. Instance the musician, who, 

 by practice, is enabled to fuse a multitude of arrange- 

 ments, auditory, tactual, and muscular, into a process of 

 automatic manipulation. Combining such facts with 

 the doctrine of hereditary transmission, we reach a 

 theory of Instinct. A chick, after coming out of the 

 egg, balances itself correctly, runs about, picks up food, 

 thus showing that it possesses a power of directing its 

 movements to definite ends. How did the chick learn 

 this very complex co-ordination of eyes, muscles, and 

 beak ? It has not been individually taught ; its personal 

 experience is nil ; but it has the benefit of ancestral 

 experience. In its inherited organisation are registered 

 the powers which it displays at birth. So also as 

 regards the instinct of the hive-bee, already referred to. 

 The distance at which the insects stand apart when they 

 sweep their hemispheres and build their cells is 6 organi- 

 cally remembered.' Man also carries with him the 

 physical texture of his ancestry, as well as the inherited 

 intellect bound up with it. The defects of intelligence 

 during infancy and youth are probably less due to a 

 lack of individual experience, than to the fact that in 



