The morning star and Catholic messenger. [volume] (New Orleans [La.]) 1868-1881, 1870-03-06

To put the thing mathematically, instinc,
is always the inverse ratio Of liberty and
knowledge. Instinct is law, or, more
appropriately, a necessity, confined to the
creature which it dries hence it is always
as civil constitutions and laws, being ex'
trinsic and having to be learned by study
not by violence and coercion, exclude every
idea of necessity, and establish the exist
ence Of our elective faculty. Civil liberty
therefore, both in republican countries
where it is, or at least is supposed to be,
the common right Of all, and in aristocratie
or despotic countries, where it is the privi-
lege of a class or of an individual, is but
the expression, the outward manifestation
of the moral liberty we are contending for,
without which civil liberty is inconceiya-
BILE, unless You want to make voters out OF
monkeys, and invest with the rights of citi-
zenship the engineerless steam engine.
| Among irrational creatures there is Meth
er serf nor franklin. Instinct is the one
sole common rule for them all, and all obey
it with an irresistible impulse. In the
aristocratic republics of migratory birds,
and among certain insects, naturalists and
entomologists have fancied they could dis
| Germ the type of the social distinctions pre-
| vailing among rational creatures; but
these analogies, even if they really do
exist, (Which this is not the time to ex-
| amine,) only proves the effect, while they
| leave the cause, as they found it, utterly
unexplored. Instinct, as well as reason, is
divine gift, albeit not in the sense in
which the Picaystne, of Feb. %, in speaking
cr cathcdra on infallibllity, most monstrously
abuses the word "gift." 1t was given to
brutes, as reason was to man, and is, like
the irresistible forces of mechanics, chemis-
try, etc.-alluded to in our last article
their distinctive attribute. 1t is irresisti-
bic, for never was brute known to feel a
want to which all of his species were not
subject; and this want gratified, never was
brute known to complain. Reason takes
IN all the forces of nature, of which it is
the responsible arbiter. 1t is the distinct
i've characteristic, the diferentia ultima, of
man, who sums up in himself all creation !;
is the mtcrOcosm of the philosopher, the
abridgment of the universe, combining in
himself the ineffective, mechanical, physi-
cal, chemical, vegetative, sensitive and
inert properties of all nature. Man. is not
puppet, therefore, as some people dream.
Liberty and reason, in their joint action,
beget art, which our race monopolises.
The beast is not an artist, the effects of
which lie is simply the instrument being
the work of nature. The spiders web, the
birds nest, the marvellous constructions of
thousands of years ago. In the excava-
tions made in the beginning of our century
among the ruins of Thebes, in Egypt, ami
NAL fossils were dug up exhibiting all the
organic characteristics common to the brute
of thirty-five or forty centuries ago and
the brutes we are familiar with now; and
we believe, If the researches of some of our
biologists were put to severe test, they
would be found to possess no more scienti-
tic value than common sense has set on the
lately discovered, or invented, Cardiff
Giant. Mere animals do not improve; man
does, or at least can. The houses he lives
in, the languages he speaks, the very
clothes he wears, the cut of his hair and
beard, are all mantle stations of this free will,
with which he is gifted, and by the exercise
of which he strives eyermore to copy. in
his own narrow sphere, the inexhaustible
richness and variety of nature herself. In
the works of man are found, it is true, GER
tain uniform elements, but these elements,
while by their uniformity they denote the
immutability of his essence, establish, by
the countless forms which they assume, the
never-ceasing mobility of his will. With
this mobility is connected another gift
peculiar to man, that is perfectibility, the
parent of civilization. Nature is stagnant,
but man, like the restless ocean, which is
continually ebbing and flowing, must re-
cede, if he does not advance he cannot
remain a moment in the same state; but
this very restlessness itself bespeaks him
free 1t is only in being free that he is
progressive, and he is free only because he
is endowed with reason. He is capable of
good in virtue of his free will, and capable
of evil, because his will is weak, vacillating
and liable to fail. But take away his free
will, and evil cannot be accounted for, and
atheism becomes logically inevitable; and
it is noteworthy fact those would-be
Christians, who deny free will, have fur
nished the English-speaking world with
II, Ill II.