and it might have been more thoroughly brought out. I do not deny the 
teaching of the paper, that there is a most marked distinction between 
instinct and reason, though I know that the boundaries of the two often 
seem to run into each other ; but it seems to me that we have ground which 
we can hold when we come to this great fact, that man has got a conscience 
—man has got a moral nature. He knows that fact most thoroughly, for 
when he does anything which is contrary to his moral nature, he con- 
demns, and he cannot help condemning himself. No man would naturally 
wish to condemn himself. Those doing anything contrary to their own con- 
sciences would naturally wish to forget the thing they had done wrongly, 
and would desire to put away the uneasy feelings awakened in their minds ; 
but they cannot do it. Now that conscience is universal. You find it 
everywhere. It is the remark of Dr. Reid, in his Philosophy, that you find 
it— the principle of justice — “ as strong within the savage breast as in the 
civilized Frenchman or Englishman.” If you invade the rights of the savage ; 
if you make an attack upon his children or his wife ; or if you take away 
his property, he has as strong a resentment and as burning an indig- 
nation against the oppressor as we should have under similar circum- 
stances. He has these feelings in an equal, and perhaps in a superior, degree 
to the civilized man. Conscience, then, is universal, but there is no innate 
conscience in the inferior animals. It has been said that they manifest 
something like a moral nature in the fear which a dog has of being punished : 
I have lately heard the owner of a dog say that he saw in it the con- 
sciousness of shame. But this is in consequence of the fact that the dog has 
been punished for these things before, and therefore he shows fear and shame. 
But it is not so with man. Man has a moral nature and a conscience, and 
the power of that conscience is sometimes so great as to cause men who have 
violated it to endeavour to get rid of their compunction by putting an end 
to their own existence. We have had this power exhibited from the very 
beginning of the history of men. We have Cain himself saying, “every one 
that findeth me shall slay me,” because he had embrued his hands in his 
brother’s blood. This sense of justice is a natural sentiment of man, and the 
very existence of revenge implanted by Cod as an instinct in the human 
breast for our own safety, proclaims with trumpet tongue that in universal 
man there is a sense of justice and of right and wrong, which implies a 
moral nature and a conscience, which I am bold to affirm it is impossible for 
any one to show existing in the inferior animals. Of course I do not refer 
to man in the very lowest state of barbarism, where neither mind nor con- 
science is developed. (Cheers.) 
4 Chairman. I should like to ofter a few remarks before this discus- 
sion is closed. The criticism which appears to me to have been passed on 
this paper is, that it comes to no conclusion. There has been no real com- 
parison instituted between the psychology of the brute and of man, and we 
have had no definition of instinct. The answer to the latter objection appears 
to have been given to us by one of the later speakers, who suggested very 
properly that perhaps there was no definition of the word “instinct,” 
VOL. Y. 2 B 
