176 MENTAL CONSTITUTION OF ANIMALS. 



of our nature, or the affections, at the head of whicii 

 stand the moral feelings of benevolence, conscientious 

 ness, and veneration. Through these, man stands in re 

 lation to himself, his fellow-men, the external world 

 and his God ; and through these comes most of the hap- 

 piness of man's life, as well as that which he derives 

 from the contemplation of the world to come, and the 

 cultivation of his relation to it (pure religion.) The 

 other sentiments may be briefly enumerated, their names 

 being sufficient, in general, to denote their functions — 

 firmness, hope, cautiousness, self-esteem, love of appro- 

 bation, secretiveness, marvellousness, constructiveness, 

 imitation, combativeness, destructiveness, concentrative- 

 ness, adhesiveness, love of the opposite sex, love of off- 

 spring, alimentativeness, and love of life. Through these 

 faculties, man is connected with the external world, and 

 supplied with active impulses to maintain his place in it 

 as an individual and as a species. There is also a faculty, 

 (language,) for expressing, by whatever means (signs, 

 gestures, looks, conventional terms in speech,) the ideas 

 which arise in the mind. There is a particular state of 

 each of these faculties, when the ideas of objects once 

 formed by it are revived or reproduced, a process which 

 seems to be intimately allied with some of the phenomena 

 of the new science of photography, when images im- 

 pressed by reflection of the sun's rays upon sensitive 

 paper are, after a temporary obliteration, resuscitated on 

 the sheet being exposed to the fumes of mercury. Such 

 are the phenomena of memory, that handmaid of intel- 

 lect, without which there could be no accumulation of 

 mental capital, but an universal and continual infancy. 

 Conception and imagination appear to be only intensities, 

 so to sj\eak, of the state of brain in which memory is 

 produced. On their promptness and power depend most 

 of the exertions which distinguish the man of arts and 

 letters, and even in no small measure the cultivator of 

 science. 



The faculties above described — -the actual elements of 

 the mental constitution-— are seen in mature man in an 

 indefinite potentiality and range of action. It is different 

 with the lower animals. They are there comparatively 

 definite in their power, and restricted in their application. 

 The reader is familiar with what are called instincts in 

 gome of the humbler species, that is, an uniform and 



