workmanlike way, with an implement with which he has been at great pains
to make for a long the past, but which he throws away as soon as he has
no longer use for it, thus showing that he had made it expressly for the
purpose of escape, do we say that this person made the implement and
broke the wall of his prison promiscuously? No jury would acquit a
burglar on these grounds. Then why, without much more evidence to the
contrary than we have, or can hope to have, should we not suppose that
with chickens, as with men, signs of contrivance are indeed signs of
contrivance, however quick, subtle, and untraceable, the contrivance may
be? Again, I have heard people argue that though the chicken, when
nearly hatched, had such a glimmering of sense that it pecked the shell
because it wanted to get out, yet that it is not conceivable that, so
long before it was hatched, it should have had the sense to grow the
horny tip to its bill for use when wanted. This, at any rate, they say,
it must have grown, as the persons previously referred to would maintain,
promiscuously.
Now no one indeed supposes that the chicken does what it does, with the
same self-consciousness with which a tailor makes a suit of clothes. Not
any one who has thought upon the subject is likely to do it so great an
injustice. The probability is that it knows what it is about to an
extent greater than any tailor ever did or will, for, to say the least of
it, many thousands of years to come. It works with such absolute
certainty and so vast an experience, that it is utterly incapable of
following the operations of its own mind—as accountants have been known
to add up long columns of pounds, shillings, and pence, running the three
fingers of one hand, a finger for each column, up the page, and putting
the result down correctly at the bottom, apparently without an effort.
In the case of the accountant, we say that the processes which his mind
goes through are so rapid and subtle as to elude his own power of
observation as well as ours. We do not deny that his mind goes though
processes of some kind; we very readily admit that it must do so, and say
that these processes are so rapid and subtle, owing, as a general rule,
to long experience in addition. Why then should we find it so difficult
to conceive that this principle, which we observe to play so large a part
in mental physiology, wherever we can observe mental physiology at all,
may have a share also in the performance of intricate operations
otherwise inexplicable, though the creature performing them is not man,
or man only in embryo?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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