Studies on Slavery, in Easy Lessons

by John Fletcher

Philosophers have, with indefatigable labour, endeavoured to enlighten the world on the subject of instinct. Can we be pardoned if we suggest that their theories on this subject signally prove they were but men? Des Cartes says—“Brutes are machines without sensation or ideas; that their actions are the result of external force, as the sound of an organ is the result of the air being forced through the pipes.” This is his “instinct.” If this be true, then it follows that every action in the material world is instinct. Then the thunder utters its voice, the earth quakes, and the telegraph works by “instinct.” Yet, his theory has found an advocate in that very classical Latin poem, “Anti Lucretius,” by Cardinal Polignac.

Dr. Reid sustains the mechanical nature of brutes, but classifies their actions into those of habit and those of instinct.

Dr. Darwin says that instinct is mental, and that the actions of brutes result from faculties, the same in nature as those of man, but extremely limited. Smellie takes the same view. Yet Darwin asserts that instinct is the reason; and Smellie, that reason is the result of instinct. Cudworth says that instinct is an intermediate power, taking rank between mind and matter, yet often vibrating from one to the other. Buffon contends that brutes possess an intellectual principle, by which they distinguish between pleasure and pain, and desire the one and repel the other. This is his instinct.

Reimar divides instinct into three classes: mechanical, such as the pulsation of the heart; representative, such as result from an imperfect kind of memory, and, so far as it is memory, in common with mankind; and spontaneous, the same as Buffon’s. Cuvier says that instinct consists of ideas that do not result from sensation, but flow directly from the brain! Dupont says that there is no such distinct faculty as instinct. His views are analogous to Darwin and Smellie.

Pope, Stahl, and others say, “It is the divinity that stirs within us.”

“And reason raise o’er instinct as you can,

In this ’tis God directs, in that ’tis man.”

Cullen, Hoffman, and others say that instinct is the “vis medicatrix naturæ.” Dr. John Mason Good says that “instinct is the law of the living principle,” that “instinctive actions are the actions of the living principle.” If so, instinct is as applicable to vegetables as to animals.

Dr. Hancock, in his work on the Physical and Moral Relations of Instinct, has evidently enlarged on the doctrine of Pope and Stahl. He says instinct is the “impulse,” “the inspiration of the Holy Spirit;” and, in his own words, “which we can only regard as an emanation of Divine wisdom.”

He asserts that the lower we descend in the scale of animal organization and mental development, the more active and all-pervading over the conduct of the animal is instinct! But, nevertheless, holds that “instinct is in such animals an unconscious intelligence.” We much admire why he did not think proper to cast off from the ancients the charge of a puerile idolatry, on the account of their worship of bulls, calves, alligators, snakes, beetles, and bugs, for they must have entertained a somewhat similar notion. But the doctor goes further, and says, that as the lower grades of the animal world have this quality, in which “the Divine energy seems to act with most unimpeded power,” so the holiest of men has it also, but consciously and willingly, and it then becomes his ruling principle, “Divine counsellor, his never-failing help, a light to his feet, and a lantern to his path.” (Page 513.) It is quite evident that the doctor’s instinct is the same with the “unerring conscience,” “the innate principle of light,” “the moral sense,” “the spiritual power,” “the Divine reason,” “the internal teaching,” “the perfect light of nature,” and “the Divine afflatus” of the theologico-abolition speakers and writers of the present day, which, they say, is the gift of God to every man. This strange error of some of these writers we have already had occasion to notice. But it is to be regretted, for the good credit of religious profession, that they did not acknowledge from whom they borrowed the idea; or, will they at this late day, excuse themselves, and frankly acknowledge they took it, not from Dr. Hancock, or any other modern, but as a deduction from the practices of ancient idolatry?