Frontier and pioneer life -- Oregon; Frontier and pioneer life -- Washington (State)
Here an important distinction must be noted. There is a thing,
universally recognized as existing, called instinct. All of the actions
of animals and many of the actions of human beings spring from instinct.
Instinct was given for self-preservation and defense. It is a sort of
semi-intellect, and sometimes in the perfection of its action is equal
to the highest development of soul-power; for instance, the action of a
bee, purely the result of instinct, in the economy of space in the
fitness of all its contrivances in making the comb, is wonderful; no
improvement can be made upon it by the highest development of inventive
genius. How does instinct act as contra distinguished from actions based
upon the exercise of soul-power? Instinct acts in a straight or direct
line with its object. As an illustration,--a tiger is hungry, a man is
hungry; the tiger sees a lamb--the man sees a loaf of bread in the
baker's window; both, left to the impulse of instinct, would go directly
to the object desired by each; the man, although cruelly hungry, as he
approaches the object of his desires, says to himself, "This bread does
not belong to me; it is the property of another, and I have no right to
take it without his consent." Here we see, in the case of the man, a
soul-power acting at right angles with the impulse of instinct and
controlling and governing the action of the man. It is only when men
are controlled by soul-power, as against instinct, that they really are
men in the higher sense of the term.
With this principle thus briefly stated, and carefully separating the
actions of men as well as animals springing from instinct from the
actions of men springing from the soul-power, we are prepared to make
the declaration that the tiger is incapable of acting on the
considerations that influenced the action of the man; the rightfulness
or wrongfulness of his act in seizing the lamb did not, nor could it
enter at all into his action; he was affected by no consideration of
right or wrong, and indeed could not be; hence we are prepared for the
conclusion that the power to think, to reflect and to judge of the moral
quality of acts and thoughts, is not possessed by the higher animal
organization, or, in other words, that they have no soul such as we have
defined it. Having thus briefly shown by a process of elimination that
man alone possesses the power that we have described as soul-power, we
have established the first part of our argument.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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