not to us of the end of the United States! That end seemed formally to be arriving in the hour of prosperity: honour was compromised, the esteem of the country falling, and the moment seemed approaching when the Confederation, identified with slavery, must succumb with it. Now, all has changed, and the friends of America can take comfort, for her grandeur is inseparable, Heaven be praised, from the cause of justice. Space has forbidden us alluding to those chapters of the Count de Gasparin's work in which he discusses the relations of slavery and the gospel, and the coexistence of the two races after emancipation. For these and many other matters we refer the reader to the volume itself, which deserves the most careful study of all who have the true interests of America at heart. A waxen-white camellia on her breast Ah, well do I remember! My love laid down where calm she lay at rest: "Twas in the bleak December: Dead, dead her heart's love-fire Mine only may expire In death's sleeping: Life-long weeping Shall not quench its ember. July-VOL. CXXII. NO. CCCCLXXXVII. 2 B ESSAYS OF A THINKER. Cogito, ergo sum. No. I. THERE is no presumption in so calling myself. We are all thinkers, good, bad, and indifferent. I make no exclusive claim to the title individually, but I do mean to claim it exclusively for my kind. There is a necessity for claiming it. Hitherto man has declared his superiority over all that lives on earth by the assertion of a MIND; but if mind be none other than our latest inquirers teach, we had better make the declaration in some other form of speech. Mind, they tell us, is nerve-power, one of the imponderable elements, not identical with electricity, but acting like it; and it is this power that lights up and sets in motion the animal organisation, as the stoker's fire evolves the power that sets the steamengine a going. Now it is certain that from Plato downwards we have never been able to raise the distinction of mind from matter out of hypothesis into an unquestioned and unquestionable fact; so that if we must give way to modern teachers in their development of mind, we had better, on our side, resign the term altogether in every process of strict inquiry, however we may conform to custom in using it conversationally. I mean that, having to contend against those who see but a higher organisation to distinguish man from other animals, we had better not persist in using a term that has failed us, while the party whom we oppose find an advantage in continuing to use it. Suppose we cease to lay a stress on the time-honoured distinction of mind from matter, of soul from body, does it follow that no essential difference is provable between man and brute?-that if, for the latter, there is no probable ground on which to build the hope of a brighter existence than the present, neither is there such ground for human hope? My reader will observe that I do not resign the long-consecrated hypothesis; I simply undertake to do without it, and to rest on the fact alone that man is a thinker. As to this fact, however, I am perfectly aware that at first stating it, a strong opinion to the contrary is likely to arise; but my reader must wait. till I have rescued the term from its wide, vague, popular use, before he concludes that his views and mine are essentially different. I shall not quarrel with him if, when struck by the solemn countenance of his dog or cat at a crisis of difficulty, he insists upon it that the creature must be thinking. In our fanciful moods we transfer even to inanimate things the powers we are conscious of at home, and the poet needs not have assured us he is telling no fable when he acquaints us how, in his saunter by Ouse's side, his dog contrived to get the water-lily that his master had not been able to reach. Beau marked my unsuccessful pains With fixed considerate face, To comprehend the case. I shall have to point out as I proceed that the intelligence which all animate creatures possess-all creatures having higher than vegetable existence is from three sources: Instinct, Habitude, and Reason; nor is there anything in Beau's demeanour, or the act that followed it, which the former two sources are unable to supply. Wonderful stories are current of intelligence in creatures not of our race; but the moment they transcend a certain limit, you and I, reflecting Reader, start back with utter incredulity. So I am sure you must, and so I am sure Locke did, on hearing the story of the rational parrot, which he reports from another's mouth in the second book of his Essay (xxvii. 8). Among current stories equally extravagant is one of a cat that was accustomed to be fed by scraps from the family dinner-table, and knew as well as the rest of the household when dinner was ready by the sound of the summoning bell. One day she happened to be shut up in another room when the bell rang, and you and I are quite ready to believe she made a violent scratching and wauling in order to be let out. So far so good. She was let out, but not till the dinner was over and the table removed. Can you now credit the rest of the tale-namely, that seeing how matters stood, and altogether untrained to perform such an act, she jumped up to the rope, and rang the bell a second time in order to bring back the dinner? Yet the fact becomes credible by a small addition to the premises-namely, that the creature had been forcibly habituated to ring the bell whenever dinner was ready, and never admitted into the room till she had performed her task. The performance would not in this case be the result of rational thought, but a link in a chain of acts and events which her training had established, and which the trained creature could no more avoid than she could avoid opening her mouth before taking food into it, the difference in the case being simply this, that the one act follows from original instinct, the other from an instinct factitious or superinduced; in a word, from habit, and habit, we know, is second nature. Can you find patience, Reader, while I attempt to carry you forward in this direction of inquiry, till we reach, as I promise we shall reach, the limit that clearly separates man from brute separates the creature happy in the present only because he looks to a brighter time to come, from creatures born for the present, and, while sensational pain is absent, satisfied with the gift of the life that is? I willingly confess, glancing at the long track of flickering light which streams from the remote Veda of Indian learning through Plato, who embodies that light in ideas of eternal truth and beauty; through Aristotle, who, denying eternal ideas, derives his categories of being from the outward universe; through the schoolmen, who subtilised the subtilties of Aristotle; through Locke, who, in opposing the schoolmen, unguardedly furnishes ground for modern sensationalism; through Kant, who, on the other hand, soars to the heights of spiritualism, looking down from the regions of the pure reason on the creations of the merely human understanding; through the followers of Kant, with whom his doctrine assumes a new phase at every turn, as figures change by turns of the kaleidoscope,-I confess that, looking at inquiry of this kind as it has heretofore proceeded, you, my reader, may reasonably fear that whatever shall follow will be Weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. I hope not—at least not unprofitable, if I shall be able to give a wholesome aspect, not to the German, but the latest English phase of the apparently interminable inquiry. It will be my first duty to place before you, in brief concentrated form, what I have gathered from teachers better informed in the matter than myself, concerning the origin and first growth of intelligence in all animate creatures. We learn that to be endowed with animal life is to be endowed with nerve-power, and with nerves that connect the inner organisation with the external senses, so that whatever from the exterior world stimulates these external senses, is carried by the nerve to the nerve-centres in the brain, and elsewhere in the frame where life has its ultimate stronghold. And this is sensation-this is the feeling of life which in different degrees is pleasurable or painful. But the nerve-power, from its first derivation into the frame, has a tendency to execute spontaneous movements independently of stimulus from the senses; and as often as such spontaneous movement takes place contemporaneously with a pleasurable or with a painful sensation, it (the inward spontaneous movement) prolongs itself when the sensation from without is pleasurable, it arrests itself when the sensation is painful, as a tentative to prolong the pleasure, to escape the pain; and so often as the attempt succeeds (it does not always succeed) it will be repeated when the occasion recurs, till, by repetitions, a link is established between the spontaneous movement and the sensation. Hence, at length, a sensation, through the nerve-power it stimulates, always awakens the spontaneous movement that shall prolong it or that shall make it cease. I would just say, parenthetically, that where there is intelligence from the first instant of existence, which is what we mean by original instinct (and who can doubt original instinct-in bees, for instance?), we have the result at once without the development which is here described. Be this as it may, I imagine my reader will admit, along with myself, that the description is likely to be a true statement of what takes place generally in the early stage of all animal existence; and with regard to brutes, whatever causes may produce or increase their intelligence are causes of inevitable occurrence. Such, for instance, is another effect which takes place in animal creatures from the repetition of sensations from stimuli without-namely, the persistence or continuance of sensations after the withdrawal of the external agent or stimulus. For all sensation is produced originally by stimulation of the nerves; and some nerves being appointed to bring in and conduct to their proper centres the excitement from without, others are appointed to bring back nerve-power from the centre thus excited, the excitement caused by an afferent nerve having its purpose and end in stimulating the nerve-centre to send out, by its efferent nerve, waves of nerve-power in return; nor is one action ever complete without the other. But along with all this there grows up a power that recovers or revives past or extinct sensations without the original external stimuli-a power which forms itself by virtue of two strong natural tendencies: first, the tendency of sensations that often occur in immediate succession to grow together, so that if only one of them be awakened, the others will awake also, each in its turn in the order of their original coherence; and in the second place, the tendency of every present sensation to awaken its like from among past and dormant sensations-that is to say, dormant till thus awakened, independently of the original stimulus from without. These facts of our animal nature, hitherto treated of under the head of the "Association of Ideas," explain in what manner the intelligence of habitude adds itself to the intelligence of instinct. But we must note further that though the difference in the time of their origin is sufficient ground for distinguishing the intelligence of habitude from that of instinct, yet the intelligence of habitude when fully acquired, is precisely the same in character and manner of operation as instinct. A dog or horse forced by his trainer through a certain routine, follows the routine after a time without the coercion which was necessary during the time; and then he can no more avoid it than he can avoid the impulse of an original instinct. More than this may, and very often does, occur, namely, that what is the effect of habitude in the parent is transmitted to the offspring, so as to be original instinct in the latter, though in the parent it was acquired. We must go to natural history to learn what arises further out of these tendencies in the animal creation. Man is a trainer of the brutes under him as often as he finds any of them that can be made subservient to his purposes; but nature is much more widely a trainer, inasmuch as every creature forced from the original limits for which its original instincts were sufficient, into a new abode for the circumstances of which those original instincts are imperfectly adapted, is acted upon by nature just in the same way as the domesticated brute is acted upon by his human trainer; that is to say, nature forces new habitudes upon the creature, sometimes modifying, sometimes wholly supplanting, its original instincts. But these new habitudes are distinct from original instinct only in the creatures that undergo the change: in the race that follows, the acquired habitudes become instincts, and it may still happen that nature or art shall add habitudes to these. Of such kind is the instruction which most animal creatures receive; and being received in this way, it is as much a part or property of the animal organisation as original instinct. Placed under the circumstances that engender it, they cannot escape its effect upon them, nor the actions that ensue. A brute has no liberty or choice of action, although there may and does often occur indecision of motive power between two instincts, or two habitudes, or an instinct and a habitude. Here is a dog, for instance, who is solicited by his natural food on one side, and by his master, whom he is accustomed to obey, calling him off from it on the other. He will stand between the two impulses no longer than will allow one of them to predominate: if his master should not repeat or urge his call, the natural instinct will take him to his food; if otherwise, the habitual affection and consequent obedience, which have become a part of his animal nature, will carry him after his master. In the foregoing statement there is nothing which I am qualified or disposed to deny, and I shall take it for granted that my reader coincides with me. For the facts, as I have stated them, we are indebted to physiology and natural history; and we take them, as we may be allowed to do, without the long array of proofs which those departments of science supply. And now let us see the amount of the general facts: First, wherever there is animal life there is sensation, the property, and the only property which can be conceived to divide the lowest degree of animal from the highest of vegetable life. But with sensation there is no ground to assert that there must be intelligence; it is more than probable that there are animate creatures so low in the scale of this kind of exist |