Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/424

408 every spring?" This seems to me a fair illustration of the prevailing notions, indicating that Prof. Huxley is mistaken in assuming that the "popular view" favors the mechanical theory. I am aware that the "popular view" cannot be urged against special inquirers, whose object often is to correct prevailing errors, as well as to extend the limits of our knowledge; but misapprehension of the popular view may give a wrong direction to their efforts and make them unavailing.

No mechanical contrivance, no mechanism furnishes any power, but is only a means of applying power; and, even if the term mechanical embraces all the phenomena of matter in motion, we still have the question as to whether the mechanism or the matter moves by its own power, or is moved by the effort of some intelligent being.

He who views the perfect crystal as the direct creation of an intelligent designing power, and he who sees in it only the orderly effect of natural forces, will alike class it with the mechanical; so, too, both would speak of the celestial mechanism.

In investigating the laws of Nature, the one is observing and generalizing the uniform mode of God's voluntary action, the other is finding the necessary consequences of the action of material forces. Each attributes any phenomena which he cannot class with any of his generalizations to some inscrutable exercise of power—the one to intelligent effort, the other to unintelligent material movements; so that, in the mechanical, we have still the question as to the two forms of power—intelligence in effort, and matter in motion; and, as between these, admitting the existence of both, it seems most reasonable to attribute instinctive action, the action of a conscious, and hence intelligent being to the former, rather than to the latter. Instinctive action is not mechanical, even in the most extended sense of the term, but must be referred to the power of the being itself, and not to extrinsic power of any kind. Every voluntary effort is put forth to gratify a want, to make the future in some respect different from what, but for the effort, it would be. To do this, always requires that the effort, or series of efforts, should be adapted to the specific object, and that, in any series of them, each one should be in the appropriate consecutive order There must be a mode, or plan of action. This plan is either a part of our knowledge, or is formed by means of it.

In all our actions, whether instinctive, rational, or habitual, we thus apply our knowledge to direct our efforts to the end desired, and there, is not in the actions themselves, nor in their immediate antecedents, any difference whatever. In all of them it is but an effort suggested by the want, and directed to a given end by means of our knowledge. The difference is not in the action, nor in the knowledge, nor in the application of the knowledge, but one step farther back—in the manner in which we became possessed of the knowledge we apply. In a rational action we, by a preliminary effort, obtain this knowledge—we make the requisite plan. In the instinctive action this knowledge is