The Moral Faculties of Brutes. 211 



THE MORAL FACULTIES OF BRUTES. 



BY SHIELEY HIBBEED. 



In an attempt to establish some general conclusions neither 

 new nor strange in reference to the respective spheres of opera- 

 tion of Reason and Instinct (Int. Obs., vol. iii. p. 436), it was 

 held that the only determinable difference between man and 

 animals is one of degree and not of hind. It is really strange 

 that, after so much has been written and said on this interesting 

 subject, it should be at all needful to prove that the faculty of 

 reason is not given to man alone, but is shared by him in 

 common with the brutes around him, but in a more liberal 

 manner, as the result, in the first place, of Creative Will, and, 

 in the second, of a superior organization. We are oftentimes 

 so deeply and subtly influenced by prejudice that even the 

 truth has the aspect of falsehood, and we renounce a doctrine 

 rather because we do not like it than because we can prove it 

 to be untrue. The doctrine of a community of reason between 

 man and animals is just one of those which the mind is in 

 haste to reject, and in such haste that it prefers not to find 

 reasonable grounds of objection, though data may be close at 

 hand, and in fact within man himself, who is the epitome of 

 the creation. 



But there can be no true progress in science unless we are 

 prepared to receive truth as precious for its own sake ; and 

 when we begin to observe the habits of animals, and to reason 

 upon the impulses of so-called instinct, we find them to 

 be parallel in every sense to the manifestations of reason in 

 ourselves. The range of brute faculties is by so much narrower 

 than the range of human faculties as this or that order is farther 

 removed from man by inferiority of organization ; but the mind 

 is of the same sort in both cases; there is but one mind, and 

 of that animals share a sufficient part for all the exigencies of 

 their life, and something more. Now it is worth asking, if it 

 is possible to separate thought from moral feeling ? if it is 

 possible for a creature to think at all without also desiring to 

 think truly and to do well ? If the animal races share with 

 man in the power of ratiocination, do they not thereby become, 

 to a certain extent, responsible agents both before God and in 

 the face of nature ? We are often told that reason is given us 

 to guide us to what is right, and we must not deny that reason 

 is given to brutes for a similar purpose, and that, if they are 

 not the victims of blind impulse, working wholly in the dark 

 to ends of which they are ignorant, then there must be some- 



