5566 Reason and Instinct, 



observation — as his very firm belief that the stars of heaven could not 

 exceed 1,500 or 2,000 at the utmost, or that there was nothing what- 

 ever at the bottom of the stable-pail, out of which he had just taken the 

 lock of hay he had dropped into it the preceding day, but a little water 

 not entirely clean. Nothing can be more presumptuous, more rash, or 

 more dangerous intellectually — perhaps even morally and religiously — 

 than to deny the existence of things for no better reason than that we 

 do not know that they exist. It bars the way to all inquiry, and leaves 

 the mind in a state of stagnation, the prey of dull ignorance and 

 growing indifference to progress and improvement. In all tentative 

 learning, in every endeavour after synthetical knowledge, it is the 

 business of the inquirer to record observation after observation, to use 

 every new fact as a stepping-stone to another newer, and to proceed 

 steadily and surely, no matter how slowly, from induction to induction. 

 What we know about that essence or innate quality of the brute 

 creation which is not bodily, is that it adapts its brute possessor, in a 

 mysterious and wonderful manner, to perform certain functions, the 

 performance of which we have learned, instinctively perhaps, to con- 

 nect with our abstract idea of the particular animal in question. We 

 know further that this essence or quality is found in every individual 

 of every tribe of living creatures; in some, it may be, almost imper- 

 ceptibly ; in others, with a strange intensity and vivacity. But we do 

 not know, we have not so much as the merest approach to reasons 

 on which to found even an inference, that there is not a connexion, a 

 necessary and self-existent connexion, between this essence or quality 

 which we label Instinct and that higher essence or quality which we 

 designate Reason, and the sole possession of which we, rather usurp- 

 in gly it may chance, arrogate to ourselves alone out of the entire 

 animal family. No doubt we have a labyrinth, by no means without 

 its measure of perplexity and difficulty, to thread our way through the 

 moment we commence the inquiry involved in what is here suggested 

 — the inquiry, i. e. whether there truly is such a connexion, — but 

 perhaps, after all, not so very much more intricate than if we limit the 

 inquiry to the human species only. The intellectual difference be- 

 tween man and man in the same highly-civilized, education-pervaded, 

 intellectually-famed community is quite as great, as startling, as in- 

 comprehensible, as between the most intelligent and sagacious of any 

 given brute family, the dog, e.g., and that other brute which shows 

 little but mental hebetude, dulness, apathy, immobility. Nor is the 

 immeasurable space between the poor Earthman or Digger and the 

 cultivated, educated Englishman or Frenchman so easily bridged over 



