AN ENQUIRY INTO THE FORMATION OF HABIT IN MAN. I GO 



solvable on the principle of keen and lasting sense-association — 

 more keen and sure than any glimmer of reason. The animals 

 would have fared much worse with a modicum of intelligence. 

 Half-instinct and half-intelligence would each be inadequate, and, 

 together, would confuse and nullify each other. Painful efforts 

 have been made to enumerate and multiply human instincts, but 

 man is not a creature of instinct any more than a brute is a 

 rational creature. The distinction is as sharp and total to-day os 

 ever, although it is quite true that much of human action is on the 

 animal plane of associated sensations and ixnpulses (as when one 

 without thought drops work at a customary signal) — these 

 connections, however, never becoming instincts simply because 

 reason disturbs and interferes with the process which in animals 

 is as certain as machinery. And this consideration greatly em- 

 phasises the radical difference between man and brute — the one 

 rational, the other not. Animal instiiict in its very genesis 

 and nature excludes reason. No over-interpreted or under-inter- 

 preted facts and strained argument can change the nature of oil 

 and water or mix them. The effoi^t has been to exalt the brute 

 and sink man, for an evident purpose, and agreeably to a mongrel 

 and inverted pliilosoiihy that is sensationist when dealing wiili 

 man and almost spiritual when treating of the brute. 



Then too, there is the germ idea which, as Dr. James Martineau 

 remarks, has become the dominant and misleading conception. ]t 

 would find in a mole-hill the origin of the Alps. There is indeed 

 a dawn of reason in a child, but it becomes full-orbed, and until it 

 is full-orbed, the child is dependent on others. It does not remain 

 half developed to reappear in another being, fully developed, 

 There is no dawn in the modn that becomes sunrise on the earth, 

 nor a germ in the daisy that becomes full-blown in the rose. 

 Moreover, any one element of reason implies all other elements, 

 and is distinguishable only logically. In Dr. Romanes' curious 

 chart of mental evolution in animals, there are fifty provisional 

 steps or levels. On the 2Ist we have fish and batrachia, 'S'ith 

 "association by similarity"; on the 22nd the higher Crustacea, 

 with " reason " ; on the 2ttth, hymenoptera, with " communication 

 of ideas " ; on the 26th, cai'nivora, &c., with "understanding of 

 mechanism " ; on the 28th, ape and dog, with " indefinite 

 morality." Abstraction begins just below the 27th, generalization 

 at the 29th, and reflection at the Sdlth. But every one of these is 

 implied in the 21st, if that be a noting and notion of qualities by 



