Is it not wonderful to think that this rapid motion of the fountain within
us goes on so noiselessly that even a baby whose little heart has only just
begun to beat, is not disturbed by it, as he sleeps in his cradle?
To all the "higher animals" God has given both heart and brain. He has
also given them, in more or less degree, that mysterious sense of which we
have spoken before, and of which we have had so many proofs; a sense which
is not at all dependent upon reason or intellect, but is found in a less
degree in men than in animals to which reason has not been given.
We have before noticed that by instinct and memory all the wants of the
brute creation are met; God has given them all that they need to teach them
to live, each in its own life, after its kind, and to provide for their
young ones; but He has not given to the "beasts that perish" the power of,
as we sometimes say, "putting this and that together," nor, as far as we
know, of learning by experience; although it does seem as if the spiders,
in making their webs, improve by practice.
Instinct teaches every living thing to get its own food, choosing that
which is suited to itself, and rejecting that which is not. It teaches the
bird or the insect to seek out a fit place in which to deposit its eggs, or
to make a nest or "homie" for them, even before they are laid; and it can
teach even such a free creature as a bird to leave for a time its airy
life, and to sit patiently upon its eggs, even carefully turning them, as
if it knew that the life of the unfledged nursling within the shell-wall
depended upon its being kept warm.
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