302 FACULTIES OF BIRDS. 



2d. That intellectual and scientific qualities do not 

 become objective in the minds of brutes ; or, that the 

 intellectual arid scientific actions which they per- 

 form are not reflected upon or contrived by them 

 as such ; thus, that they possess no intellectual or 

 scientific consciousness, and consequently that no 

 intellectual or scientific design can be attributed to 

 them ; and, therefore, that so much of intellectual or 

 scientific design as appears conspicuous in their ac- 

 tions must be the effect of intellectual arid scientific 

 powers or energies, acting upon them in a region of 

 their minds above the sphere of their proper con- 

 sciousness. 



*' Admiring and respecting as I do the endeavours 

 of all who are engaged in the promotion of philosophic 

 inquiries, I cannot but think that in the particular 

 subject before us too much has been done to confound 

 the natures of man and brute, and to separate both 

 from the fountain of their existence. Man is what 

 he is, and derives his superiority over the brute 

 creation from the circumstance that all things what- 

 ever become morally and scientifically objective to 

 him ; and the brute is what he is, and derives his 

 inferiority from the total absence of this distin- 

 guished and ennobling faculty. It is true that many 

 specious arguments may be and have been advanced 

 to prove that brutes participate in human rationality, 

 in kind, if not in degree ; but the ends which their 

 natures are evidently destined to fulfil would be, one 

 might imagine, alone sufficient to refute the suppo- 

 sition. For it is but reasonable to conclude that the 

 conscious powers of the creature will be according to 

 the ends of its existence; and as these ends are in 

 the brute creation neither moral nor scientific, but 

 purely natural, and as regards themselves only sub- 

 servient to what is moral and scientific, it thence 

 would follow that they are not possessed in themselves 



