Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/167

120 This acts in a different way. It generalizes from experience; makes an induction from facts; a deduction from principles. It looks both backwards and forwards. The man of understanding acts from experience, reflection, forethought, and habit. If he had no other impelling principle, all his action must be of this character. But though understanding be capable of indefinite increase, instinct can never be wholly extirpated from this compound being, man. The most artificial or cultivated feels the twinges of instinctive nature. The lower animals rely entirely on instinct; the savage chiefly thereon, while the civilized and matured man depends mostly on understanding for his guide. As the sphere of action enlarges which takes place as the boy outgrows his childhood, and the savage emerges from barbarism, instinct ceases to be an adequate guide, and the understanding spontaneously developes itself to take its place.

In respect, then, to Man's animal nature, this fact remains, that there is an external supply for each internal want, and a guide to conduct from the want to the supply. This guide is adequate to the purpose. When it is followed, and thus the conditions of our animal nature complied with, the want is satisfied, becomes a source of pleasure, a means of development. In this case there is nothing miraculous intervening between the desire and its gratification. Man is hungry. Instinct leads him to the ripened fruit. He eats and is appeased. The satisfaction of the want comes naturally, by a regular law, which God has imposed upon the constitution of Man. He is blessed by obeying, and cursed by violating this law. God himself does not transcend this law, but acts through it, by it, in it. We observe the law and obtain what we need. Thus for every point of natural desire in the body, there is a point of natural satisfaction out of the body. This guide conducts, from one to the other, as a radius connects the centre with the circumference. Our animal welfare is complete when the two are thus brought into contact.

Now the same rule may be shown to hold good in each