Delgado smiled an ugly smile, that showed all his teeth, not pleasantly, but like the teeth of a bulldog snarling. ‘Do you tink, sah,’ he said sarcastically, ‘dat dem fightin’ Dupuy is gwine to help a poor black naygur to go back to him own country? Ole-time folk has proverb; “Mongoose no help cane-rat find de way back to him burrow.”’
Edward could hardly believe the sudden transformation. In a single moment, with the change of language, the educated African had vanished utterly, and the plantation negro stood once more undisguised before him. And yet, Edward thought curiously to himself, which, after all, was the truest and most genuine of those two contrasted but united personalities—the free Mussulman, or the cowed and hopeless Trinidad field-labourer? Strange, too, that while this born African could play as he liked at fetichism or Christianity, could do obeah or sing psalms from his English hymn-book, the profoundly penetrating and absorbing creed of Islam was the only one that had sunk deep into the very inmost marrow of his negro nature. About that fact, Edward could not for a moment have the faintest hesitation. Delgado—Coromantyn or West Indian—was an undoubting Mussulman. Christianity was but a cloak with which he covered himself outwardly, to himself and others; obeah was but an art that he practised in secret for unlawful profit: Islam, the faith most profoundly and intimately adapted to the negro idiosyncrasy, was the creed that had burnt itself into his very being, in spite of all changes of outer circumstance. Not that Delgado believed his Bible the less: with the frank inconsistency of early minds, he held the two incompatible beliefs without the faintest tinge of conscious hypocrisy; just as many of ourselves, though Christian enough in all externals, hold lingering relics of pagan superstitions about horseshoes, and crooked sixpences, and unlucky days, and the mystic virtues of a cornelian amulet. Every morning he spelt over religiously a chapter in the New Testament; and every night, in the gloom of his hut, he read to himself in hushed awe a few versicles of the holy Koran.
When story and comment were fully finished, the old African rose to go. As he opened the door, Edward held out his hand for the negro to shake. Delgado, now once more the plantation labourer, hesitated for a second, fearing to take it; then at last, drawing himself up to his full height, and instinctively clutching at his loose cotton trousers, as though they had been the flowing white robes of his old half-forgotten Egyptian school-days, he compromised the matter by making a profound salaam, and crying in his clear Arabic gutturals: ‘May the blessing of Allah, the All-wise, the merciful, rest for ever on the effendi, his servant, who has delivered a just judgment!’
In another moment, he had glided through the door; and Edward, hardly yet able to realise the strangeness of the situation, was left alone with his own astonishment.
INSTINCT AND REASON.
In the following paper we propose to discard entirely the word mind as an expression of the faculty of reflection, since it is frequently misapplied or misunderstood, and its employment is vague and unsatisfactory. We prefer using a term denoting the receptivity of ideas through an organic medium by an immaterial force having the power of acting on the ingestion of ideas, and diffusing its action through the corresponding media of the nervous system: this we shall call the intellectual force, and its action is the sequence of conscious or unconscious cerebration. It is not our purpose to enter upon a consideration of the higher relations of intellectual action with so-called spiritual forces, as this would necessarily tend to the contemplation of an extra element than that more particularly implied in the attributes of instinct and reason; for by these words, in their ordinary acceptation, we recognise two separate faculties, independent, yet coexistent, and capable of harmonious co-operation, but not necessarily co-ordinate nor coexistent, since the one we contend to be the natural property of all animated beings; while the other is in part the result of transmitted intelligence, education, and enlightenment, conveyed from a higher to a lower power.
Instinct, as the more universally diffused and common endowment, is to be found throughout the whole range of the animal kingdom; and to deny its existence in one class of creation and grant it in another is illogical and contrary to the recognised and established plan of creation; it is rather a general inheritance; in some forms of life the chief or sole guide to voluntary action; while in other or higher forms, partially overlaid, and in a measure superseded, by the faculty of reason. Yet we should be, we think, altogether wrong in supposing it non-existent, because, through the cultivation and development of reasoning power, it is less easily discerned, and less fully exercised in man, than in the lower animals; for, by inquiry in the lives of uncivilised humanity, we shall find undoubted proofs of instinct in the ordinary passages of savage life, as in the choice of food; the selection of certain herbs for medicinal purposes; the capacity of tracking a path from one point to another in great distances; the avoidance of poisonous articles of diet; casual injuries; and, above all, the clinging to life which is common to all mankind. And even in civilised beings, we may discern evident traces of the same property underlying the more ostensible gift of reason, and instinctive, though otherwise unaccountable, motives leading to definite conclusions. These may take the forms of likes or dislikes towards outer objects; impulses, frequently and truly termed unreasonable, because they arise apart from reason, and are purely instinctive; hence actions that are simply the outcomes of instinct, not reconcilable to the written laws of reason or the mandates of civilisation.
In some rare instances of humanity run wild, only a few of which have been recorded, where, by some accident, a human offspring has grown up as a denizen of the forest and the companion of wild beasts, the gift of instinct serves the same purpose it fulfils in the rest of the creation; and when first brought into contact with civilisation, these outcasts have apparently evinced few, or none, of the actual attributes of reason, though these have become perceptible later on through human companionship and attention. But even centuries of cultivation and the highest hereditary advantages fail utterly to eliminate or destroy the inherent property of instinct in man; for not only, as above stated, is it displayed in the common shrinking from death and the avoidance of injury and suffering, but it manifests itself in countless other instances in daily life. Let us regard the union of sexes as one: how frequently is the choice of a partner in life made through nothing less than a blind instinct, often apart from any reasoning process, so much so, that the fact has passed into a proverb that ‘Love is blind.’ And in the common affairs of life, it is often possible to trace an independent course of action pursued without reference to a reasoning faculty, rather by a blind adherence to an unseen hidden principle, which is undoubtedly instinct guiding rather than reason. And this obedience to an unknown faculty has doubtless, in the history of the world, played important parts; especially when, in prehistoric times, man was essentially a predatory animal. On his instinctive love of fighting for personal aggrandisement, and his instinctive love of the chase for providing food and clothing, his very existence in a great measure depended. Indeed, the motives which influence and direct men’s lives are only, after all, the attributes of instinct, as we commonly observe portrayed in civilised society; thus, in one, the instinct of commercial enterprise pushes towards speculation; in another, the instinct of self-preservation induces precautions of benefit to the community; again, the instinct of need prompts measures for procuring supplies of food and clothing. On all hands, human instinct is an active agent and irrepressible.
And further, we may find the instinct of an unseen yet overruling power dominant in one form or another among the whole human race; even where, degraded by numberless superstitions, it exists among the dusky tribes of Africa, the Red American Indians, or in the countless mythological legends of nations long passed away, the instinctive belief in a God holds universal sway. In the common affairs of life, too, the teaching of instinct is displayed, as in presentiments, which, like impulses, have frequently no rational basis, but by the observance of which, our lives are not uncommonly modified in their effects and made subservient to the unseen. It is indeed possible, were the chapters of human lives actually recorded, it would be found in how many important instances and numberless occasions the exercise of instinct prevails above that of reason. It is, however, to be noted, that in proportion as the exercise of intellectual force is stimulated by education and strengthened by practice, instinctive action becomes more and more influenced by reason; and just as particular muscles, by long use, increase in bulk, so the repeated receptivity of ideas by the higher organism of the brain leads to the reflective powers being increased; and, as a natural consequence, the actions thus performed betoken the connection of ideas from which they spring, and are consequently attributed to reason.
Reason may thus be regarded, in the abstract, as the result of ideas received by the sensory ganglia, and transmitted by them to the higher organs of perception, reflected thence on the motory system by which the actions of animal life are governed, the repeated discharge of these functions constituting processes of thought or reflection.