ON BREEDING. 
391 
seems as evident to me that some of them do, in certain in¬ 
stances, reason, as that they have sense; but it is only in parti¬ 
cular ideas, just as they received them from the senses. They 
are, the best of them, tied up within those narrow bounds, and 
have not, as I think, the faculty to enlarge them by any kind 
of abstraction.” They possess reason sufficient to distinguish 
things around them ; to know their friends from their foes, and 
their masters from others who do not treat them kindly :— 
“ Like us they love or hate, like us they know 
To joy the friend or grapple with the foe.” 
They possess instinct sufficient to enable them to discriminate 
between noxious and innoxious food. Plants which are rejected 
by one, become a delicacy to another. The hog devours the 
horsetail and the henbane ; the goat the thistle and hemlock ; 
the sluggish cow pastures in the rich valleys, whilst the capri¬ 
cious goat browzes on the rocky hills. 
No animal extends its industry beyond its instinct; but man 
alone raises his intelligence up to that of nature. Possessed of 
social principles in every stage of his being, at all times, and in 
all places, he has possessed reason and imagination, the two 
grand sources of invention. He is sent into the world with fa¬ 
culties of observation, and nearly every actual supply is withheld 
from him ; not through the want of resources in nature, but as a 
bereavement peculiar to the destiny of a being, who, by his own 
abilities, is able to accommodate himself to his situation, and to 
be the artificer of his own fortunes: and they who have contem¬ 
plated him in every situation have decided, that the state where 
lie attains the perfection of his character, is that which affords 
him the fullest exercise of his intellectual faculties, without in¬ 
jury to his corporeal powers. Hence the remark of Aristotle, 
“ That we are to judge of man in a state of advancement, not 
in that of ignorance and barbarity, a progress in knowledge and 
civility being natural to him. Thus mankind are always in a 
state of improvement:— 
“ Were man to live coeval with the sun, 
The patriarch pupil would be learning still; 
Yet, dying, leave his lesson half unlearnt.*’ 
But all other animals, from the first creation of the species, are 
equal to their tasks. No animal ever introduced any new im¬ 
provement, or any variation from their former practice. The 
movements of the beaver, the ant, and the bee, are precisely 
the same in every region : they are limited to the instinct of the 
animal. “ The ox never thinks of resowing the grain which he 
treads out in the barn-floor, nor the monkey the maize of the field 
