6048 



Reason and Instinct 



which the notices of the senses are either confirmed or denied." [Id. 

 i. 181). And there is this further difficulty, that the immense majority 

 of mankind will, according to the strict definition, be cut off from all 

 but a nominal possession and exercise of Reason. For my own part, 

 therefore, I should be disposed, in preference, to use distinctive terms 

 applied to the word Reason itself; thus, the Higher Reason or Pure 

 Reason (Kirke's ' Physiology,' 452), and the Lower Reason or Natural 

 Reason ; which latter, in the words used by Archbishop Leighton and 

 commented on by Coleridge, is the faculty that is said to judge 

 according to sense." And so I should feel justified in the use — 

 objected to by Mr. Tagart — of such expressions as the degree or 

 kind of exercise of Reason from its simplest manifestation to its more 

 complicated operation." 



Next T proceed to notice the accounts or definitions of Instinct 

 given by these writers. " The word Instinct brings together a num- 

 ber of facts into one class by the assertion of a common ground, the 

 nature of which ground it determines negatively only, — that is, the 

 word does not explain what this common ground is, but simply indi- 

 cates that there is such a ground, and that it is different in kind from 

 that in which the responsible and consciously voluntary actions of 

 men originate. Thus, in its true and primary import. Instinct stands 

 in antithesis to Reason ; and the perplexity and contradictory state- 

 ments, into which so many meritorious naturalists and popular writers 

 on Natural History have fallen on this subject, arise wholly from their 

 taking the word in opposition to Understanding." — ('Aids,' i. 190, 

 note.) This passage is extracted from a note appended to a series of 

 remarks on a portion of a Lecture delivered at the Royal College of 

 Surgeons, by Mr. Green, Professor of Anatomy. " In explaining the 

 nature of instinct," Mr. Coleridge says, " as deduced from the actions 

 and tendencies of animals successively presented to the observation 

 of the comparative physiologist in the ascending scale of organic life 

 — or rather, I should have said, in an attempt to determine that pre- 

 cise import of the term which is required by the facts — the Professor 

 explained the nature of what I have elsewhere called the adaptive 

 power, that is, the faculty of adapting means to a proximate end, — 

 I mean here a relative end, — that which relatively to one thing is an 

 end, though relatively to some other it is in itself a mean. ... I give 

 as the generic definition of adaptive power, the power of selecting 

 and adapting means to proximate ends ; and, as an instance of the 

 lowest species of this gemis, I take the stomach of a caterpillar: I ask 

 myself under what words I can generalize the action of this organ, 



