MENTAL CONSTITUTION OF ANIMALS. 



177 



unprompted tendency towards certain particular acts, as 

 the building of cells by the bee, the storing of provisions 

 by that insect and several others, and the construction of 

 nests for a coming progeny by birds. This quality is 

 nothing more than a mode of operation peculiar to the 

 faculties in an humble state of endowment, or early stage 

 of development. The cell formation of the bee, the 

 house-building of ants and beavers, the web-spinning of 

 spiders, are but primitive exercises of constructiveness, 

 the faculty which, indefinite with us, leads to the arts of 

 the weaver, upholsterer, architect, and mechanist, and 

 makes us often work delightedly where our labors are in 

 vain, or nearly so. The storing of provisions by the ants 

 is an exercise of acquisitiveness — the faculty which with 

 us makes rich men and misers. A vast number of cu- 

 rious devices, by which insects provide for the protec- 

 tion and subsistence of their young, whom they are per- 

 haps never to see, are most probably a peculiar restricted 

 effort of philo-progenitiveness. The common source of 

 this class of acts, and of common mental operations, is 

 shown very convincingly by the melting of the one set 

 into the other. Thus, for example, the bee and bird will 

 make modifications in the ordinary form of their cells and 

 nests when necessity compels them. Thus, the alimen- 

 tiveness of such animals as the dog, usually definite with 

 regard to quantity and quality, can be pampered or edu- 

 cated up to a kind of epicurism, that is, an indefiniteness 

 of object and action. The same faculty acts limitedly in 

 ourselves at first, dictating the special act of sucking : 

 afterwards it acquires indefiniteness. Such is the real 

 nature of the distinction between what are called instincts 

 and reason, upon which so many volumes have been 

 written without profit to the world. All faculties are in- 

 stinctive, that is, dependent on internal and inherent im- 

 pulses. This term is therefore not specially applicable 

 to either of the recognized modes of the operation of the 

 faculties. We only, in the one case, see the faculty in 

 an immature and slightly developed state ; in the other, 

 in its most advanced condition. In the one case, it is 

 definite, in the other, indefinite, in its range of action 

 These terms would perhaps be the most suitable for ex- 

 pressing the distinction. 



In the humblest forms of being we can trace scarcely 

 anything besides a definite action in a few of the faculties 



