5588 Reason and Instinct. 



emanating from that authority, it carries the essential elements of its 

 own completion in itself. Man's hand, no less than man's language, 

 the mechanical engine and the intellectual instrument, each — so to 

 speak — supplementary and auxiliary to the other, effectually maintain, 

 — nay, rather, progressively widen — the impassable gulf fixed from the 

 beginning between man, the ruler, and the rest of creation, the subjects. 

 What has the most sagacious, the most intelligently-acting brute; 

 the dog that almost talks to you and quite understands much that you 

 say; the oran, which has been taught to stitch its own clothes and to 

 sit at table with a propriety and cleanliness never dreamed of in hun- 

 dreds upon hundreds of not the least refined households, their members 

 not the coarsest mannered, in civilized England or France : — what 

 have they to compare with the hand of man ? The various tribes of 

 animals which accompany man in his migrations over the face of the 

 globe, and by their wonderful capability of successive or gradual 

 adaptations to new climate, new food, new circumstances, seem almost 

 to superinduce a new nature ; those other animals which hand down 

 through their posterity, and with increasing force, their own pecu- 

 liarities of habits or instinct, an intellectual property entailed on each 

 of their descendants; — what have they to set against man's supreme 

 faculty of comparing and compounding the elements of knowledge ; 

 of imparting to others, his contemporaries, or his successors, after the 

 lapse of centuries, the elaborated results ; of transmitting from genera- 

 tion to generation an ever-accumulating immensity of practical expe- 

 rience, experimental knowledge and abstract philosophy of every 

 varied description ? And all this, be it observed, quite apart from the 

 contrast involved in the one word "hereafter." To the mere animal 

 there is the love of life — to man, the desire after immortality : the 

 instinctive longing, or yearning, rather, of the latter is for something 

 commensurate with the capacity and the duration of " the conscious 

 living agent, himself," and which he feels rather than knows is reserved 

 only, but surely, in the mysterious recesses of Eternity ; that of the 

 former reaches no further than food, well-being, safety, the mere 

 requisites of the life that now is. 



I will add no more than the following passage from the writings of 

 Sidney Smith, perhaps as appropriate as any that could be written : — 

 "I confess I treat on this subject (the anima brutorum) with some 

 degree of apprehension and reluctance, because I should be very sorry 

 to do injustice to the poor brutes who have no professors to revenge 

 their cause by lecturing on our faculties, and at the same time I know 

 there is a very strong anthropical party who view all eulogiums on the 



