or ant-hills, cocoons or gossamers; their care of their young, and providence for the future; all are founded on certain spontaneous or instinctive tendencies, differing in all species, and yet analogous in all; and even in the same species presenting very wide differences according to circumstances, and which become still more wide under the influence of domestication. They have desires and aversions, love and hatred, hopes and fears, emulations, gratitude, and even love of property, of the home which they have selected, and of the stores which they have provided for the future.

All these tendencies are qualities inherent in the very nature of things; they are essential elements of the mineral, plant, or animal in which they are found, and which, without them, would not be what they are; they give to all things their place and name among the varieties, species, genera, and families that constitute the world. Whether all the germs of these natural tendencies have yet been developed, we know not; but we may be sure that science has not yet discovered them all. The influence of cultivation has developed many of them, which would, without it, have remained unknown to us. Let us briefly consider this.

Many latent tendencies of plants and animals have been developed by changing their circumstances, and many obvious tendencies have been suppressed in the same way. The tendency of the apple, pear, and plum-tree to produce thorns is suppressed or reduced under the influence of cultivation, and their fruit greatly improved in beauty, richness, and variety. The wild rose and other wild flowers will scarcely bear comparison with their cultivated progeny in their variety of form and hue and fragrance. The grains that are to us the staff of life, compared with their wild state, produce a thousand fold. The esculent roots which are so common in our gardens, and constitute so large a portion of our daily food, have all been changed in flavour by cultivation, and become adapted to the tastes of man and his domesticated animals; the turnip has increased from ounces to pounds, the beet, the parsnip, and the carrot, from roots like a pocket pencil in size, often exceed the size of a man's arm, and all are improved in quality and multiplied in variety. And so it is with the fowls and other animals with which man surrounds his home; they change in colour, size, shape, and qualities; old tendencies are suppressed, and others before unknown are developed.

We have noticed these spontaneous tendencies with some detail, because it seems to us that the observation of them in mere inorganic or dead matter, multiplied in vegetable productions, and again largely increased in animal nature, and continuing still further to increase as we rise to the highest

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grades of animal life, constrain us to expect to find similar tendencies more fully and variously developed in man, who stands at the head of all known organic life. The most superficial observation shows that they do abound in our human nature, and it is of the utmost importance to admit that they constitute essential and fundamental elements of our moral and intellectual, as well as of our animal nature.

The mind can, no more than mere material nature, act at all without its antecedent tendencies to act given to it by its Creator. It has its fundamental character and functions allotted to it in the plan of creation, and these are the germs, forms, and tendencies of all its future development and activity, and it can have no others, unless derived from the same Divine source. It cannot act, or think, or feel, without innate tendencies to do so, no more than the vegetable can grow, and flower, and fruit, without such tendencies. And whence these tendencies come, faith alone, and not science, can reveal to us. Science must confine itself to ascertaining and defining what they are, and how they act and grow. They may be called the instincts of our moral and intellectual

nature.

We know that some have objected to have them thus denominated; but in this we are guilty of no innovation. Very few writers on mental philosophy have failed to recognize that they have this fundamental character; some, as it were, instinctively, and many others by calculation and design. The analogy between the natural tendencies which produce the actions of men and animals, is too strong to avoid giving to them the same name, instincts. They must be distinguished by their adjectives: animal instincts, and rational instincts.

Others would object to the term as applied to man, because there is a sort of necessity and infallibility about instinctive actions which do not at all apply to man's rational and moral activities. This argument has often been used by those who deny to man his moral sense, and refuse to admit that he has any innate moral character; yet its major premise is entirely unfounded. The natural tendencies and instincts of the lower orders of creation are not invariable in their manifestations, and do not necessarily follow internal law, irrespective of external circumstances and relations.

We may call the vital principle in vegetable and animal life a blind power of nature, acting necessarily under appropriate circumstances; yet it by no means acts uniformly even in the same species. So far as we know, all vital tendencies are subject to change, improvement, degradation, adaptation to circumstances. This seems to be of the nature

of life. The vital principle develops itself with a general resemblance in each species of vegetables and animals; and yet with endless special and individual varieties, so that notwithstanding the supposed identity of nature or vital principle, we are not entitled to say that any two beings developed from it are alike in form or character.

The variety that arises from cultivation is still more worthy of notice in this connexion; for if the comparatively limited natural tendencies of the vegetable and brute creation may, by cultivation, produce all the wonderful changes of character that are manifest to all who choose to observe; if they develop new and better tendencies and qualities under favourable circumstances, how much more is this to be expected of man, with his higher and more numerous tendencies. And if they become degraded and lose their good qualities from neglect of cultivation, how much more shall man; since all his voluntary acts operate directly on his character, and only indirectly upon theirs.

The least amount of reflection must make it very apparent that there is a logical necessity to assume the existence of these spiritual tendencies as the basis of all mental development or growth, and that we are constrained to infer them from the moral and intellectual facts of our nature; for from nothing, nothing comes, and of nothing there can be no development. Without vital tendencies there can be no growth, and without spiritual tendencies no moral and intellectual improvement; they are the gifts of God, the Divine foundations on which must be constructed all that man can, in any sense, call his own. He has no duties, functions, or capacities that are not founded on them, and dependent on their development. All his faculties are at first spiritual instincts, and act spontaneously; and it is only after they have become considerably developed that they become subject to reflection and self-control.

These instincts constitute the germs and early growth of all our affections of love, hatred, gratitude, imagination, hope, fear, emulation, curiosity, love of society, desire of property; none of which can be created by the will of man. It is only when we have learned enough about them to know how to regulate, restrain, and guide them in reasonable coördination, that we can truly be said to be rational beings.

All our reasonings, conceptions, and ideas have our spontaneous activity for their essential basis. The mind, before perception, is like a seed before it is affected by heat and moisture; it remains dormant in all its qualities; but it has qualities and tendencies that are sure to be developed by perception. Perception is the first experience of the mind,

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as warmth and moisture are of the seed, and development follows in both cases. It is the mind's spontaneous acquisition of the materials of thought and reflection, which also are spontaneous acts of the mind, as the circulation of the blood and the sap are of animals and plants.

Spontaneously and instinctively the mind generalizes the gifts of perception, and coördinates the results of generalization; and it is by the spontaneous memory of these natural processes that it learns their nature and value, and becomes prepared to make a rational use of them. It gets its start and its first experience in this way; but it cannot go far without the conscious aid of the rational will. The strong and systematic thinker is distinguished by the degree of volition exerted in attention and reflection. All our first acts of attention and observation are perfectly spontaneous, and not at all voluntary; and it cannot be otherwise, for we cannot will to direct our minds to anything of which our minds have had no previous possession. And all our first acts of analysis and reflection, and indeed of every character, are equally spontaneous and instinctive; for it is as impossible for the will to choose methods of mental action, without a previous knowledge of such methods, as it is to make choice of a road to be travelled, or of a trade to be learned, without knowing that there are roads and trades.

All this would seem to be plain matter of observation and experience, and therefore falls within the province of inductive science, though not much noticed by the school of Bacon, because the master had not thus applied his method. So far as we can see, these instincts seem to be a necessary part of our spiritual nature. If animal instincts are necessary for the support of animal life, and vital activity for its start, why must there not be intellectual instincts and spontaneity for the start and maintenance of intellectual life? Under circumstances giving rise to perception, intellectual spontaneity must act. It must begin before it can be conscious of beginning, and before having any knowledge of itself. It must think before it can know itself-and we might almost say, before it can have a self to be known. It must form judgments before it can know its powers, and how they act. It must have experience before it can know what experience is. It must analogize, analyze, synthetize, and hypothetize, before it can have any conception of these processes, or learn how to direct them.

There must be a spontaneous germination and growth of our spiritual nature, or an instinctive activity of it. There must be natural germs of thought, which are not created by experience, but are the conditions of it, and exist before it.

Habit and education cannot give them, for they are but forms of experience, and depend upon it. When awakened into life, they are not moulded by experience, but it by them. Experience influences the essential forms of thought no more than warmth and nourishment influence the essential forms of vegetable and animal growth. Perhaps the first step in the process of mental germination is the waking up of the consciousness to attend to its sensations, and then perception comes in answer, as it were, to the interrogatories, what? when? where? whence? how ?-all suggested by, and calculated to give definiteness to experience.

It is no valid objection to the instinctive origin of a mental process, that it does not develop itself in the earliest stages of human life, or that, in many minds, it is scarcely developed at all. Every herb and tree must arrive at some degree of maturity before it can develop its fruit-bearing tendencies. And so it is with man and the lower animals; their physical instincts are not all developed at the first, but at different stages of life. As we have noticed before, different tendencies are developed or suppressed, according to circumstances of climate, nourishment, and training. It must be, therefore, that many intellectual instincts cannot become manifest until, through other avenues, the mind is furnished with the materials on which they are to act. Perhaps a man might live half a lifetime within sight and hearing of the Falls of Niagara, without having ever experienced the wonder which they are calculated to excite. But let him stand beneath that frowning cataract, and view the huge chasm which it has worn in those old rocks, and think of the ages it has rolled down its mighty flood, and uttered its thunder-voice, and of the ages it will still continue to roll and thunder, of the oceans it has emptied over, and which it will still pour down that dizzy height, of the victims who have been swallowed up in its deep abyss, and of the terrible destruction that would follow if that rock barrier above him should suddenly give way, and his hair may stand on end with awe and wonder. Not because he wills to wonder, but because he cannot help it; he may never before have experienced the sentiment; and it comes not from his will, but spontaneously from the very nature of the mental constitution which God has given him.

Take a very obvious illustration of the instinctive character of many of our most common actions, which shows that, without our instincts, we should be utterly helpless. There is no motion of our body that can be said to be entirely voluntary and rational. If we intentionally give our arm a certain motion, we will only the given motion, and not at all the special means by which it is to be effected; for it is done by nerves