— 
INSTINCT AND REASON. . 107 
But if the infant comes into the world entirely devoid of 
any affection, or even of any kind of knowledge, both of 
which are possessed by animals to an extent sufficient for 
their needs from the very beginning, it may be asked, 
What is the birthright of the human being? What endow- 
ment does he possess which shall compensate for the 
absence of any innate knowledge or ideas? ‘The answer is 
plainly, Faculties; the power of gaining by experience and 
teaching the knowledge it does not at first possess; the 
power of receiving impressions, cognitions, and thence 
thoughts and ideas; the power of obtaining adequate and 
suitable furniture for the spacious and prepared chambers of 
the mind; a power which in its scope is practically unlimited, 
—not indeed infinite, in the real sense of the expression, but 
yet unbounded in its progressive capability of development. 
A Man is born, indeed, devoid of innate ideas, but he pos- 
sesses in their stead faculties for acquiring ideas to an 
indefinite extent; and hence his vast superiority over 
anjmals, which possess no such faculties or capabilities, but 
which are restricted from their birth to the sensuous know- 
ledge and perceptions and the corporeal affection or nature 
into which they are born, and above which they can uever 
by any possibility rise. Instead of differing from animals as 
regards their mental endowments, in degree only, a Man’s 
intellectual and moral powers are of a radically different 
kind, discontinuous, and upon a higher plane, capable of 
indefinite expansion, and of a cumulative progression utterly 
foreign to the nature of the brute creation. 
There exists, then, a most important radical distinction 
between the instinct of animals and the Intelligence of Man, 
a distinction which no theory of Evolution can, by any pos- 
sibility, bridge over, or account for eyen in the smallest par: 
ticular. The animal is born in possession of all its mental 
powers, as it were, ready for use, with everything in esse, 
and with nothing whatever in posse. The Man, on the other 
hand, has no positive endowments at his birth, but he pos- 
sesses what we term Faculties, capable of being from that 
time forth indefinitely cultivated. He possesses, that is, 
nothing whatever in esse, but everything in posse. The 
animal knows, at, or in some cases soon after, birth all that 
he is ever capable of receiving of knowledge, his utmost 
powers being only of a sensuous kind, into which thought 
and ideas do not, nor ever can, under any circumstances, 
enter. The Man is born with nothing but a power of recep- 
tivity, a budget of faculties for imbibing knowledge and 
