316 ON LIFE AND ORGANISATION. 



Instinct is a collective term applied to those laws, in virtue of 

 which the psychical endowments of the animal are so adjusted in 

 reference to its organism with its functions, and to all the necessary 

 and contingent circumstances in its existence, as to enable them to 

 work together harmoniously in the adaptation of means to ends, 

 without self-consciousness. 



On the other hand, that peculiar principle in the constitution of 

 man, which acts independently on his instincts, and in virtue of 

 which he is conscious of self, capable of apprehending the objects 

 around him as external to self, enabled to exert his corporeal and 

 psychical powers in the accumulation and co-ordination of ideas and 

 their signs ; but, above all, capable of determining between right 

 and wrong ; of recognising his own immortality ; and his depend- 

 ence, as well as the dependence of all around him, on his and their 

 Divine Creator, is an intelligence altogether different in kind from 

 the instinctively co-ordinated intelligence of the brute. 



The bee, in the performance of its work, unconscious of self, but 

 capable of exerting its will, and determining its acts, invariably does 

 so under the unerring guidance of a plan or code of rules, sufficient 

 for, and co-extensive with, all the acts, and the succession of these 

 acts, necessary and contingent, which it is required to accomplish, 

 within its own sphere, in the general polity of the hive. It is 

 neither a chemist, a geometrician, an architect, nor a politician. It, 

 nevertheless, unconscious of the regulating principle, but under 

 the guidance of the laws which control its psychical economy, fulfils 

 its scientific, artistic, and political functions, with unerring accuracy 

 and without previous training. 



When man enters the sphere of his present existence, that 

 peculiar principle, which is henceforward to regulate his psychical 

 economy, is potential only, not in actual operation. Coming into 

 play contemporaneously with the apprehensions of sense, it is so 

 unprepared for the regulation of the economy of the individual, 

 that he cannot even employ efficiently his organs of sense, or per- 

 form of himself many necessary functions which the animal, under 

 the control of the instinct, fulfils at once. 



But, by degrees, and contemporaneously with the indications of 

 sense, it becomes evolved until the individual is capable of moving 

 in a sphere, and of reacting on surrounding objects, in a manner 



