INSTINCT AND CONSCIENCE.

Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, Issue 38, 22 June 1878, Page 2

INSTINCT AND CONSCIENCE.

[BY REV. Ji SEPH COOK, BOSTON.] Since man docs possess instincts by lie is led to act as if tho approval of a Higher Being wero the end of lifo, we are to investigate these instincts at leant as searohingly as we do thoso of the boe, tbe ant, and the beaver. I. Instinct is an exhibition of intelligence, in but not of tho being to which tho instinct oolongs. Your bee builds according to mathematical rule; but do you jjupposc that all tho intelligence it exhibts is in an intelleot possessed by that insect? Has it planned, has ft thought out geometrical probloras, and at last ascertained in what inothod to construct tho honeycomb ? None of us boliovßthat. Wo hold that the beo work* by instinct, and the difference) between in sttnet, nnd rctis m Is vniv broad. In-

itinct never improves its works, but reason Joes. The bird builds her nest now as she did before the Flood, and the honeycomb is the same to-day as it was in the carcass of the lion when Sampsou went down to Jordan. Instinct copies itself and no more. It builds better than it knows somewhat knows how well it builds. Somewhat knows, did I say i What a contradiction it is to affirm that Somewhat knows! Somewhat does not know anything. Somewhat is nobody. You all admit with Mathew Arnold that behind Conscience there is a Somewhat, there is a Someone. When Mathew Arnold says that, an Eternal Power not ourselves loves righteousness, ho is introducing surreptitiously the idea of a Someone behind the Somewhat. Someone loves ; Someona may fight intelligently for righteousness; but Somewhat who loves righteousness ! Self-contradictions ]>ervade the most characteristic phrases of Arnold. Ho constantly introduces the idea of Someone in his citations of Biblical language and in his own sometimes very happy phrases. They are happy chiefly because they conceal, effective, under the cloak of rhetoric the very ideas he opposes. The Someone he will not name explicity; but he constantly uses the idea of Someone implicity. He asserts the existence of a Somewhat, but he will not not admit the existence of a Someone except surreptitiously, using the idea though not confessing its existence. Assuredly, if we are to follow Mill in the examination of tho eye, we must suppose that the idea of the honeycomb exists before honeycomb, as the idea of the eye goes before the eye. The idea mu3t exist somewhere before the plan of these structures existed. Somewhere there must have been an adequate eau3e of the adaption of part to part in tho honeycomb.

Almost imperceptible creatures in the tea build in the Indian Ocean a goblet. It is called Neptune's cup. Sometimes it has a. height of sis feet and breadth of three. It is ereoted "solely by myriads of polypi, fragile animals' Shrunk within th ir holes, and only half issuing in order to plunge their microscopically small arms into the waves. One of these creatures, struggling to keep its position on some reef, made, perhaps, by the grave of its predecessors, begins to build, without any eonsulation with its swarming mates. | Tlioy all build, and-they, fashion little by littlo the biso of the goblet. They then ! carry up the long slohdaur stem. They j have no insulation with eaoh other in I their homes thore under the seas. Eieh I works in a separate cell; each is as much cut oflf from communication with every other as an inmate of a cell in the wards of Charlestown Prison yonder is from his associates. They build the stem to the proper height, and then they begin to widen it. They enlarge it,, and commence the construction of the sides of the cup. They have no communication with eaoh other. They build up the sides, leaving u hollow within. - Everything proceeds according to a plan. You have first the pedostal, then tiro stem, thon the widened tlunge of the goblet, thenthohollow within, looking up to heaven. The.savage passes and gazes on Neptune's oup iu the Indian Ocean, and is struok with reverence. He says in his Becrot thought: These creatures cannot speak with eaeh other, but they act on a plan as .if they were ail in a conspiracy to produce just this Neptune's cup. Is the plan thoirs, or does it oolong to a powor above thorn and that acts through them. Your poor savage there on the foaming coast of the tropics looks up to tho same sky into which the cup gazes, and finds the Author of the form of that Neptune's goblet in a Power not of but in tho creatures which build it. It is in them, but not of them, for they have no intellect which can con reive what tho goblet is ;■ but in isolation from each other they so build their cells that they produce at last a structure having a plan held in view, not only apparently but in fact, from the first. Even your foremast French . materialists find themselves dazed when they stand where this savage does. One of their opponents, writing lately, affirms tb'afc ..Neptune's cup is tho noblest challenge.£hat can be I thrown down before the school of materialistic evolution. (Pouchet," The Universe," pp. 59, 61.) And, yet wo have mon so tilled, not with tho, depth of the sea of thought, but.jvith its mere forth —so filled with what even the coral insects might rebuke, disloyalty to instinct, that when they stand before 'Noptuue'a cup thoy see nothing to wonder at But just as these isolated creatures build Neptune's cup, to the bioplastie, isolated from each other, in the living tissues which they produce, build the rose and the violet and all tiowers.tho pomegranate and the cedur, the oak and the palm and all tho trees, tho caglo and all birds, the lion and all the animals, the human brain and all men. It is absolutely noccssary that the builders of Neptune's cup should bo governed by one dominant idea. Doos chemistry explain the origin of their common thought f. It is absolutely necessary that all the bioplasts that weave any living organism should bo govorned by one idoa, and that idea (Mors with the differences of individual living forms. Does chemistry explain tho origin of that co-ordinating thought t Ncptuno's oup alone, striken us dumb. But what shall wo wy of the mystic structures built by the blasts / There is tho cup ; it is a fact; and the eye is another Neptune's cup; and the hand another Ncptuno's cup;and all this universe is u.. other .Ncptuno's cup ; and put of such cup 11, for ono, drink tho glad wine of Theism. 2. The instinct* cf the bee, the beaver the migrating bird, are found, whin aeienoucally investigated, to ratio no false

expectations ; they nil have their, correlates : they are never created to be mocked. 3. From the existence of the profound instiucts of Conscience, we must infer that they, too which scientifically interpreted, raise no false expeeta lions. 4. But it is conceeded that there instincts iu the human mind by which man is led to work :u> if the approval of a Higher Being were the aim of life. o. This instinct involves a conciousness of God as not merely a Somewhat but also a Someone. It is not to be supposed that any scientific line fathoms toe depths of the nature of the Someone or of the Somewhat revealed in the instincts of Conscience. But tho quality of an infinity we may know even who . we caunot know its quantity. Knowledge does not cease to be knowledge by becoming Omniscience. Power does not cease to be power by be. omiug Omnipotence. Space does out cease to be space by becuuiin" infinite in extent. Time is time, although you stretch it out to the infinites and the eternities. Intellect, does not cense to bo intellect by becoming iniinite. The seat of intellect '. That was Paley's definition of personality. We have no bettor definition than that. Wherever we have a thinker, we know, therefore, that thero uxists a person. Ideas flame from all quarters of the uni- : verse ; plans appear in all the upper Indian Oceans yonder, and in the surf of tho constellations where the starry dust of the neubula floats as spray. We find there a plan, and here a plan ; and wherever a plan, we find an idea ; wherever an idea, a thought; wherever a thought, a thinker; and wherever a thinker, a person ; and so, if you say all has been evolved, we say oi necessity that ail has been produced by an Evolvei. G. It is conceded everywhere that Conscience foi bode 3 punishment and anticipates reward. 7. Those activities of Conscience which forebode punishment and anticipate re-, ward involve a consciousness of God as personal. The sense of obligation and the sense of dependence both involve a consciousness ol God as personal. . Let your thoughts run through the vistas of historical precedents. (Jail up Socrates with his protesting genius, which always told him not to do. Gall up every great poet that has addressed the Muses ; call up every orator that has invoked the j aid of the gods; remember Demosthenes there on the B'euia, looking abroad on the matchless landscape, the temples, the touihs-of the men who fell at Salamis, and yet invoking, above them all. the immortal gods. Remember that no public State assembly was opened at. Athens in her Lest days unless preceded by prayer. A dripping cloud would disperse an audience in the Pnyx, and that because men thought that this portent indicated that the gods were against their assembling. Vot.uive tablets to Jupiter clothed the naked rocks at the sides of the Bciua. Even your_ Napoleon believes in a protecting genius.' Lowell pictures the first man in his naturalness ;is God-con juered with his face to. heaven upturned. In our highest moments we instinctively speak of a Someone, and not merely of a Somewhat.. • Richter says that when a child first witnesses a thund 'istorm, when the greatest objects of nature, such as the Alps, the Himalayas, or.the ocean, come before the mind for the first time, then is the moment in which to speak of God; for the sublimo everywhere awakens the thought, not only of a Somewhat, but of a Someone behind it. Not a Soinewuu: merely, but a Someone walks on Niagara's watery vim. The further up you ascend the Alns.-if your thoughts are awake, the more near you come to anticipated communion, notonly with Somewhat but with Someoue higher than the Alps, or than the visible heavens that are to be rolled away. There are in the midnights on the ocean voices that .the waves do not utter. I have paeed to and fro on the deck of a steamer midway -between England and America, and- remembered that Greenland was on the north and Africa and the Tropic Islands on the south in the resounding, seething dark, and my home behind pie and the, mother isle before me. Lying on the deck looking into the topgallant and watobing them sway to and fro among the constellations, and listening to the roll'.of the .great deep, I havo given myself, I hope,"Sbine opportunity to study the voices of nature there ? but I assure you that my experience has been like that of every other in the moments when the sublimities of the sea and the stars liavo spoken loudest. A Somewhat and a Someone greater than they spoke louder yet The most audible word uttered in that midnight in the centre of the Atlantic was not concerning Africa or America or England, or the tumbling icobfrgs of the North, but of the Someone who holds' all the immensities and the eternities in His palm as the small diuit of the balance. Was that, natural? Was it instinctive ? Or was this mood a forced attitude of spirit ? I should have thought I was not human if I had not hod a tendency to such a mood. I should have been a stunted growth I I (rati almost said a lightning smitten trunk wftfioiit the'foliage that belongs to the upper faoultiet—without the sensitiveI ness that comes from the culture of one's I wholo nature—if I had not felt behind the Somewhat of the material globe the Someono giving it ordor. :». In the deepest experiences of roBMM there is a sense In the soul of a | disapproval not only by a Somewhat, but also by a Someone. I 10 It is a fact of human naturo that total submission of the will to Conscience I brings into the soul immediately n strange

I sense of the Diviti" approval and DM MM i as Personal. —Australian Witness. March : 18CS.