Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/203

Rh in England who can blush half so expressively as a dog found out in sharp practice—blushing, of course, being taken in a sense applicable to the dog's tail? Whether wild animals have such a sense of the value of any positive laws is more than we know; but wild animals, down to the lowest orders, show at least the maternal instinct. The devotion of beasts to their young belongs, one would say, to the highest order of moral beauty—except that it extends too low down among animated beings to please some people. Yet we may presume that the most hard-hearted of metaphysicians would find it hard to suppress an emotion of sympathy and approval at the sight of a bird overcoming its timidity to fight for its little puff-balls of children. It is a more pathetic if not a more sublime sight than those starry heavens with which we are so often bored. There is a bit of metaphysical quibbling, by which it is endeavored to evade the obvious inference. It seems to come to this, when analyzed, that, though the bird performs an heroic action, it has never framed the general proposition, Mothers ought to love their young. That is undeniable; but surely the bird is on the high-road to it. Light up its feeble brain with a little more intelligence, and it will have no trouble in fitting its instincts with the proper strait-waistcoats of formula. To deny virtue to the bird would be to deny it equally to the savage, who has movements of generosity and self-devotion, though it has never occurred to him to speculate on moral philosophy. There is, of course, a difference between the virtue which merely results from the spontaneous play of unselfish instincts, and that which includes a certain fist of definite propositions on the subject formed by reflection and observation. But where the first is present, even in a high degree, it is not difficult to account for the gradual development of the second.

The argument, however, has another fatal weakness, if it is intended to raise a presumption against the possible passage from apehood to manhood. Assume, if you please, that the difference is as wide as possible. Suppose that reason and the moral sense are as different from the rudimentary thoughts and passions that animate the feeble brute-brain as water from fire or as mind from matter. That will not raise any presumption that there must be a sudden gap in the chain of animated beings, unless you can prove that the new element, whatever it may be called, must enter, as it were, at one bound. If reason be radically different from instinct, yet reason may be present in some creatures in a merely rudimentary form. The question, indeed, does not admit of argument. We always have before our eyes a perfect and uninterrupted series. The child of six months old is less intelligent than a full-grown dog; and if we would imagine the development of man from monkey, we have only to suppose the first monkey to be the equal of an average baby (say) of one year old, the monkey's son to be equal to a baby of a year and a day, and so on. We may thus proceed by perfectly imperceptible stages, and in the course of three