The Philosophy of Natural Theology: An Essay in confutation of the scepticism of the present dayJackson, William
Religion
The Philosophy of Natural Theology: An Essay in confutation of the scepticism of the present day
Jackson, William
Natural theology; Religion -- Philosophy; Religion and science
[156] Galen remarks upon the immediate activity of animal instinct
prior to example or habituation. Most Naturalists know his experiment
of hatching three different sorts of eggs together. He was much struck
to see the young aquatic bird, reptile, and eaglet, betake themselves
at once, each to his vocation. Some persons referred these instincts
to the influence of organs fitted for definite uses, yet, observes
Galen, the young calf will butt before he has got horns. A good deal
might be added to Galen's rejoinder. Animals seem often to work without
fitness of organization,--or one might almost say in defiance of their
organs. "There is nothing," says Sir C. Bell, "in the configuration
of the black bear, particularly adapted for his catching fish; yet he
will sit, on his hinder extremities, by the side of a stream, morning
or evening, on the watch, like a practised fisher, and so perfectly
motionless as to deceive the eye of the Indian, who mistakes him for
the burnt trunk of a tree; when he sees his opportunity favourable,
he will thrust out his fore-paw, and seize a fish with incredible
celerity. The exterior organ is not, in this instance, the cause of the
habit or of the propensity; and if we thus see the instinct bestowed
without the appropriate organ, may we not the more readily believe,
in other examples, when the two are conjoined, that the habit exists
with the instrument, although not through it?" (_Bridgewater Treatise_,
Chap. x. p. 250.)--In Captain Cook's third voyage there is another
anecdote of bears equally curious. "The wild deer (barein) are far
too swift for those lumbering sportsmen; so the bear perceives them
at a distance by the scent; and, as they herd in low grounds, when he
approaches them, he gets upon the adjoining eminence, from whence he
rolls down pieces of rock; nor does he quit his ambush, and pursue,
until he finds that some have been maimed." (Vol. 3, p. 306.)
In such cases as these, there is a manifest want of correspondence
between animal organisms and animal instincts, which many naturalists
consider essentially interdependent. Yet on their mutual action and
reaction some have founded a theory of evolution.
[157] "We have in the Veda the invocation _Dya[=u]s pítar_, the Greek
[Greek: Zeu pater], the Latin _Jupiter_; and that means in all the
three languages what it meant before these three languages were torn
asunder--it means Heaven-Father. These two words are not mere words;
they are to my mind the oldest poem, the oldest prayer of mankind,
or at least of that pure branch of it to which we belong--and I am
as firmly convinced that this prayer was uttered, that this name was
given to the unknown God before Sanskrit was Sanskrit, and Greek was
Greek, as when I see the Lord's Prayer in the languages of Polynesia
and Melanesia, I feel certain that it was first uttered in the language
of Jerusalem." Professor Max Müller's _Science of Religion_. New Ed. p.
172.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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