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198 instance, and absent in the other. But this is not so plain, so simple, or so sure as it appears. We now address ourselves to the examination of this question and answer; as the subject we had in hand in the foregoing chapter did not permit us to discuss them fully in that place.

Leaving man out of the survey, let us look abroad into the universe around us, and consider what is presented to us there. In mineral, in vegetable, and in animal nature, we behold life in the greatest possible vigour and variety. Active processes are every where going on; and throughout the length and breadth of creation there is a constant succession of changes. The whole earth is, indeed, teeming with every form and every colour of existence; and that enjoyment is there too, who can doubt when spring is in the air, and the lark singing in the cloud?

Here, then, we have a creation brimful of activity and life, and no pause in all its vigorous and multifarious ongoings. What is there, then, in man which is not to be found here also, and even in greater and more perfect abundance? Is it intelligence? Is it reason? You answer that it is. But if by reason is meant (and nothing else can be meant by it) the power of adapting means to the production of ends, skill and success in scientific contrivances, or in the beautiful creations of art, then the exclusive appropriation of reason to man is at once negatived and put to shame by the facts which nature displays. For how far is human intelligence left behind in many things by the sagacity of brutes, and by the works which they accomplish. What human geometer can build like a bird its airy cradle, or like the bee her waxen cells? And in exquisite workmanship, how much do natures still more inanimate than these transcend all that can be accomplished even by the wisest of men? "Behold the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin; yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of them." Perhaps you may say that these things are entirely passive and unintelligent in themselves, and that in reality it is not they, but the creator, who brings about all the wonders we behold; that the presiding and directing reason is not in them, but in him. And this may readily be admitted; but, in return, it may be asked home: Is man's reason vested in the Creator too?

Do you answer yes? Then look what the consequences are. You still leave man a being fearfully and wonderfully made. He may still be something more than what many of his species at this moment are, mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. He may still be a scientific builder of houses and of ships—a builder and a destroyer of cities. He may still subdue to his dominion the beasts of the field, and raise himself to be a ruler over his fellow-men. The reason within him is not his own, yet in virtue of it he may perform works inconceivably wonderful and great. But, with all this, what is he, and what sort of activity is his? Truly the activity of a spoke in an unresting wheel. Nothing connected with him is really his. His actions are not his own. Another power lives and works within him, and he is its machine. You have placed man completely within nature's domain, and embraced him under the law of causality. Hence his freedom is gone, together with all the works of freedom: and, in freedom's train, morality and responsibility are also fled.

Do you answer No, to the question just put? Do you say that man's reason is his own, and is not to be referred to any other being? Then I ask you why, and on what grounds do you make this answer? Why, in one instance, do you assign away the reason from the immediate agent, the animal, and fix it upon the creator, and why in another instance do you confine and attribute it to the immediate agent, the man? Why should the engineer have the absolute credit of his work? and why should not the beaver and the bee? Do you answer that man exhibits reason in a higher, and animals in a lower degree; and that therefore his reason is really his own? But what sort of an answer, what sort of an inference, is this? Is it more intelligible that the reason of any being should be its own absolutely, when manifested in a high degree, than when manifested in a low degree? or is the converse not much the more intelligible proposition? If one man has a hundred thousand pounds in his coffers, and another a hundred pence, would you conclude that the former sum was the man's own, because it was