5586 Reason and Instinct. 



outlaws by their own people at some remote epoch. " The tests," 

 says Dr. Carpenter, in the introductory chapter of his ' Human 

 Physiology,' " by which we recognise the claims of the outcast and 

 degraded of our own, or of any other highly civilized community to a 

 common humanity are the same as those by which we should estimate 

 the true relation of the Negro, the Bushman or the Australian to the 

 cultivated European. If, on the other hand, we admit the influence 

 of want, ignorance and neglect in accounting for the debasement of 

 the savages of our own great cities, — and if we witness the same effects 

 occurring under the same conditions among the Bushmen of Southern 

 Africa, — we can scarcely hesitate in admitting that the long-continued 

 operation of the same agencies has had much to do with the psychical 

 as well as the physical deterioration of the Negro, Australian and other 

 degraded savages. * * * . * All the evidence which we at present 

 possess leads to the belief that, under a vast diversity in degree and in 

 modes of manifestation, the same intellectual, moral and religious 

 capabilities exist in all the races of mankind." 



Or again ; with respect to infants or children deserted by their 

 parents, or otherwise deprived not only of parental but of all human 

 care whatever, and who — the units in thousands — have survived the 

 exposure, and contrived to maintain an existence, however precarious : 

 — with all their human attributes, with all their claims to man's heri- 

 tage of intellect and reason, they have been no better, for the most 

 part, than " the beasts that perish." They could be taught to speak 

 but, at the utmost, a few nearly unintelligible words. Self-control and 

 self-guidance were as little characteristics of theirs as of " the horse or 

 the mule" mentioned by the Psalmist. In fact, they have been, so 

 far as we are able to judge from what we know of the savage of Aveyron 

 and others in like case, but melancholy monuments of the utter ruin 

 which befals man's supremacy when he is shut out from a participation 

 in that fostering care and those potential means by which his intel- 

 lectual superiority is, in the first instance, reared and established, and 

 in the second, secured to himself and his descendants after him. 



On the whole, then, our conclusion that instinct, in the case of the 

 lower animals, pre-supposes reason, — understanding by that word an 

 emanation from, or the operation of, an intellectual essence identical 

 with that belonging to man, — appears to us to be not a little confirmed 

 by attentively observing the effects produced, as well by the silent 

 teaching of association as by careful and systematic training, upon the 

 mind, the habits and the nature of the brute creation ; effects, more- 

 over, as we have seen, remarkably analogous to what are produced 



