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sions produced on the senses, or whether we apply the term 
instinct to the whole of the complex mechanism by which the 
animal is guided to the performance of such actions as conduce 
to his preservation, or whether, on the other hand, we limit the 
term to the desires alone. As a matter of convenience, I will 
employ the term “ natural sagacity ” in reference to this 
modifying machinery, whenever it may be necessary to consic ei 
it apart from the desires. # . 
9 But when we have admitted the existence of this automatic 
principle, and allowed its adequacy to produce all the actions 
of the brute, we are met by a still more serious difficulty. 4 or 
the existence of this principle is held, virtually at least, by 
many thinkers who extend it to all the actions of man— who 
consider that the brute is governed automatically by the con- 
ditions which surround him, but who consider at the same time 
that man himself is impelled and controlled only by instincts, 
and that although his instincts may be occasionally of a higher 
and more complex nature, yet that he is really as much of an 
automaton as the brute ; the only difference between man and 
brute being just the kind of difference which exists between 
two barrel-organs, one of which plays twice as many tunes as 
the other. As an illustration of this view I will quote the 
words of a well-known fatalist of the last century— the Baron 
d’Holbach : 
« The will, as we have elsewhere said, is a modification of the brain, by 
which it is disposed to action or prepared to give play to the organs. The 
will is necessarily determined by the qualities, good or bad, agreeable or 
painful, of the object or the motive that acts upon his senses, or of which 
the idea remains with him, and is resuscitated by his memory. In conse- 
quence he acts necessarily ; his action is the result of the impulse he receives 
either from the motive, from the object, or from the idea which has modified 
his brain or disposed his will. When he does not act according to this 
impulse, it is because there comes some new cause, some new motive, some 
new idea, which modifies his brain in a different manner, gives him a new 
impulse, determines his will in another way, by which the action of the 
former impulse is suspended ; thus, the sight of an agreeable object, or its 
idea, determines his will to set him in action to procure it ; but if a new 
object or a new idea more powerfully attracts him, it gives a new direction to 
his will, annihilates the effect of the former, and prevents the action by 
which it was to be procured. This is the mode in which reflection, expe- 
rience, reason, necessarily arrests or suspends the action of man’s will ; 
without this he would of necessity have followed the anterior impulse which 
carried him towards a then desirable object. In all this ho always acts 
