INSTINCT AND CONSCIENCE.

Thames Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2894, 25 May 1878, Page 4

INSTINCT AND CONSCIENCE.

Almost imperceptible creatures in the sea build in the Indian Ocean a goblet. It is called Neptune's Cup. Sometimes it has a height of six feet, and a breadth of three. It is erected solely by myriads of polypi, fragile animals shrunk within their 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. They all build, and they fashion little by little the base of the goblet. Then they carry up the long slender stem. They have no consultations with each other in their homes there under the seas. Each works in a separate cell; each is as much cut off from communication with every other, as an inmate of a cell ip the wards of a Prison is from his associates. They build (he 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 build up the sides, leaving a hollow within. Everything proceeds according to a plan. You have first the pedestal, then the stem, then the widened flange of the goblet, then the hollow within, looking up to heaven. The savage passes and gazes on Neptune's Cup in the Indian ocean, and is struck with reverence. These,

creatures act on a plan as if they were all in a conspiracy to produce just this Neptune's Cup. Is the plan theirs, or does it belong to a power above them and that acts through them. Your poor savage there on the foaming coast of the tropic? looks up to the same sky iuto which the cup gazes, and finds, the Author of the form 1 of that Neptune's goblet in a Power hot of, but in the creatures that build it. It is in them but not of them, for they have no- intellect which can conceive what the 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 onJy'apparently, but in fact, from the very first. Even your foremost French materialists find themselves dazed when they stand where this savage does. Ine of their opponents, writing lately, affirms that Neptune's Cup is the noblest challenge that can be thrown down before the school of materialistic evolufion. (Pouchet, " The Universe," pp. 59, Gl.) And yet we have men so filled, not with the depth of the sea of thought, but with its. mere froth — so,, filled with what even the coral insects might rebuke, disloyalty to instinct, that when they stand before Neptune's Cup they see nothing to wonder at. But just as these isolated creatures build Neptune's Cup, so the bioplasts, isolated from each other, in the living tissues which they produce, | build the rose and. the violet and all flowers, the pomegranate and the cedar, | the oak and the palm and all the trees, ' the eagle and all birds, the lion aud all animals, the human brain and all men. It is absolutely necessary that the builders of Neptune's Cup should be governed by one dominant idea. Does chemistry explain the origin of their common thought? It is absolutely necessary that all the bioplasts that weave any living organism should be governed by one idea, and that idea differs with the | differences of. individual living forms. [Does chemistry explain the origin of that co-ordinating thought P Neptune's Cup alone strikes us dumb. But what shall we say of the mystic structure built by the bioplasts ? There is the cup; it is a fact, and the eye is another Neptune's Cup, and the hand another Neptune's Cup, and all this universe is another Neptune's Cup. "