5456 Reason and Instinct. 



hardly relevant at all in our discussion, and I only refer to it because 

 some, if not founding their notion on this passage, have at all events 

 sought to confirm that notion by a reference to it, — the notion, I mean, 

 that for the brute creation, as well as for the family of man, the present 

 is not the only existence, — that there is a hereafter of life for the former 

 as well as for the latter. If, however, there cannot be found more coun- 

 tenance for this notion in other arguments besides any which may be 

 afforded by the text in question, it must, I think, remain without either 

 support or foundation. For the whole rests upon the supposed sense 

 of our translation, or rather, of one word in it, — " creature," — which 

 word does not bear, in the passage, any other sense the least 

 differing from that borne by the expression "whole creation:" the 

 word in the original being the same in each of the four verses quoted, 

 viz. rj ht'ktis. 



On the whole, then, I am of opinion that a reference to the pages 

 of Scripture does not, in the least degree, assist us in the conduct or 

 solution of our inquiry, all that we find being either allusions to man's 

 immense and unquestioned superiority over the beasts, with injunctions 

 to him, thereon founded, to be careful not in any wise to lower himself 

 toward the level of the beast by unworthy conduct; or else an admission 

 of, or allusion to, the existence of a mystery past solving by human 

 wisdom. 



The safer and better and wiser method of conducting the inquiry 

 would seem to be that of considering, as attentively and impartially as 

 possible, the various actions of various species of animals, and then to 

 endeavour, first, to refer such actions to what may reasonably appear 

 to have been their source or influential cause, whether mere instinct or 

 mingled instinct and reason, or what certainly can be no less than 

 reason ; and then, in the second place, if reason, to weigh and estimate 

 what degree or kind of exercise of reason, from its simplest manifesta- 

 tion to its somewhat more complicated operation, may be supposed to 

 be betokened by the several actions indicated. 



The first part of this process has been already attempted, at least in 

 a measure, in a former paper, and in the present paper we shall not 

 formally retrace the steps then taken. 



Now I do not mean to imply that it may prove to be easy, perhaps 

 even possible, in a vast number of cases, to discriminate with absolute 

 certainty between what clearly is instinct, and what, as clearly, is not 

 instinct, as illustrated, I mean, by this or that set of actions possibly 

 supposed to be prompted by it. In the instance of an infant how 

 difficult it is, in its earliest period of life, to trace the difference which 



