INSTINCT AND REASON. 95 
most (apparently) intelligent individual out of the most 
(apparently) intelligent race of animals, and teach that 
individual animal with the utmost care, skill, experience, and 
patience, and what is the result ? Nothing can, even under 
any circumstances, convey to that animal the uature of an 
abstract idea; nothing can ever give it the power of framing 
an intellectual conception, or a lofty judgment; nothing can 
succeed in endowing it with the power of forming a rational 
inference of the simplest kind. The terms wise, intelligent, 
intellectual, moral, are clearly misnomers as applied to them. 
And yet, although all this is disputable and acknowledged, 
there is a large school of mental Evolutionists which con- 
tinues to hold and to teach that the instinct of animals 
differs from the Reason of Man in degree only and not in 
kind. 
The lowest savage, who lives almost like a beast in his 
aboriginal condition, on being brought into contact with 
civilisation, may be taught to use true intellectual processes ; 
may be made to comprehend abstract ideas; may be in- 
structed to appreciate judgment, to reflect on co-existences 
and sequences; may be led to a sense of responsibility ; 
may, in a word, be proved an intellectual, moral, and religious 
being. The lowest savage can, indeed, even without teach- 
ing or civilising contact, communicate with his fellows, 
impart ideas, and seek aid and sympathy from his fellow-men 
by means of articulate speech. But none of these things 
can any animal do. How say they, then, that instinct and 
intelligence are alike in kind, and differ only in degree ? 
So also can the human infant, in the first dawn of its in- 
telligence, comprehend and enter into the ideas of its elders 
in a “continually increasing degree; learn, without difficulty, 
the use of speech by impartment from. its parents or nurse, 
and rapidly dev elop its faculties under judicious and suit 
able instruction ; and in all respects proclaim the superior 
plane upon which its mental constitution is framed, a plane 
which no imaginable extension of animal instinct in its degree 
could ever conceivably touch. 
But, although we have said that animals possess no innate 
ideas, for the simple reason that they do not possess ideas at 
all, inasmuch as they are incapable of thought, we neverthe- 
less wish to be understood as affirmimg that whatever en- 
dowments of a quasi-mental character they do stand pos- 
sessed of are innate; in other words, that the powers they 
exhibit of effecting those acts and combinations which come 
under the general name of Instinct, and which are in all 
