THE BELFAST ADDRESS 197 



sensitive prehensile lips. In the Primates the evolution 

 of intellect and the evolution of tactual appendages go 

 hand in hand. In the most intelligent anthropoid apes 

 we find the tactual range and delicacy greatly augmented, 

 new avenues of knowledge being thus opened to the ani- 

 mal. Man crowns the edifice here, not only in virtue of 

 his own manipulatory power, but through the enormous 

 extension of his range of experience, by the invention of 

 instruments of precision, which serve as supplemental 

 senses and supplemental limbs. The reciprocal action 

 of these is finely described and illustrated. That chas- 

 tened intellectual emotion to which I have referred in con- 

 nection with Mr. Darwin is not absent in Mr. Spencer. 

 His illustrations possess at 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 Under- 

 standing are sometimes 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 automatic. 

 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 instantly, and with- 

 out effort, fused to a single perception. Instance the bil- 

 liard-player, whose muscles of hand and eye, when he 

 reaches the perfection of his art, are unconsciously co- 

 ordinated. Instance the musician who, by practice, is 

 enabled to fuse a multitude of arrangements, auditory, 

 tactual, and muscular, into a process of automatic manipu- 

 lation. Combining such facts with the doctrine of hered- 

 itary transmission, we reach a theory of Instinct. A chick, 

 after coming out of the egg, balances itself correctly, runs 



