Part 12 (1/2)
[Sidenote: WE ASK NOT WHENCE BUT WHAT AND WHITHER]
I addressed a b.u.t.terfly on a pea-blossom thus, ”Beautiful Psyche, soul of a blossom, that art visiting and hovering o'er thy former friends whom thou hast left!” Had I forgot the caterpillar? or did I dream like a mad metaphysician that the caterpillar's hunger for plants was self-love, recollection, and a l.u.s.t that in its next state refined itself into love? Dec. 12, 1804.
[Sidenote: a.n.a.lOGY]
Different means to the same end seem to const.i.tute a.n.a.logy. Seeing and touching are a.n.a.logous senses with respect to magnitude, figure, &c.--they would, and to a certain extent do, supply each other's place.
The air-vessels of fish and of insects are a.n.a.logous to lungs--the end the same, however different the means. No one would say, ”Lungs are a.n.a.logous to lungs,” and it seems to me either inaccurate or involving some true conception obscurely, when we speak of planets by a.n.a.logy of ours--for here, knowing nothing but likeness, we presume the difference from the remoteness and difficulty, in the vulgar apprehension, of considering those pin-points as worlds. So, likewise, instead of the phrase ”a.n.a.logy of the past,” applied to historical reasoning, nine times out of ten I should say, ”by the example of the past.” This may appear verbal trifling, but ”_animadverte quam sit ab improprietate verborum p.r.o.num hominibus prolabi in errores circa res_.” In short, a.n.a.logy always implies a difference in kind and not merely in degree.
There is an a.n.a.logy between dimness and numbness and a certain state of the sense of hearing correspondent to these, which produces confusion with _magnification_, for which we have no name. But between light green and dark green, between a mole and a lynceus, there is a gradation, no a.n.a.logy.
[Sidenote: COROLLARY]
Between beasts and men, when the same actions are performed by both, are the means a.n.a.logous or different only in degree? That is the question!
The sameness of the end and the equal fitness of the means prove no ident.i.ty of means. I can only read, but understand no arithmetic. Yet, by Napier's tables or the _House-keepers' Almanack_, I may even arrive at the conclusion quicker than a tolerably expert mathematician. Yet, still, reading and reckoning are utterly different things.
[Sidenote: THOMAS WEDGWOOD AND REIMARUS]
In Reimarus on _The Instincts of Animals_, Tom Wedgwood's ground-principle of the influx of memory on perception is fully and beautifully detailed.
[”Observations Moral and Philosophical on the Instinct of Animals, their Industry and their Manners,” by Herman Samuel Reimarus, was published in 1770. See _Biographia Literaria_, chapter vi. and _Note_, by Mrs. H. N.
Coleridge in the Appendix, _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, iii.
225, 717.]
[Sidenote: HINC ILLA MARGINALIA]
It is often said that books are companions. They are so, dear, very dear companions! But I often, when I read a book that delights me on the whole, feel a pang that the author is not present, that I cannot _object_ to him this and that, express my sympathy and grat.i.tude for this part and mention some facts that self-evidently overset a second, start a doubt about a third, or confirm and carry [on] a fourth thought.
At times I become restless, for my nature is very social.
[Sidenote: CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA]
”Well” (says Lady Ball), ”the Catholic religion is better than none.”
Why, to be sure, it is called a religion, but the question is, Is it a religion? Sugar of lead! better than no sugar! Put oil of vitriol into my salad--well, better than no oil at all! Or a fellow vends a poison under the name of James' powders--well, we must get the best we can--better that than none! So did not our n.o.ble ancestors reason or feel, or we should now be slaves and even as the Sicilians are at this day, or worse, for even they have been made less foolish, in spite of themselves, by others' wisdom.
[Sidenote: REIMARUS AND THE ”INSTINCTS OF ANIMALS”]
I have read with wonder and delight that pa.s.sage of Reimarus in which he speaks of the immense mult.i.tude of plants, and the curious, regular _choice_ of different herbivorous animals with respect to them, and the following pages in which he treats of the pairing of insects and the equally wonderful processes of egg-laying and so forth. All in motion!
the sea-fish to the sh.o.r.es and rivers--the land crab to the sea-sh.o.r.e! I would fain describe all the creation thus agitated by the one or other of the three instincts--self-preservation, childing, and child-preservation. Set this by Darwin's theory of the maternal instinct--O mercy! the blindness of the man! and it is imagination, forsooth! that misled him--too much poetry in his philosophy! this abject deadness of all that sense of the obscure and indefinite, this superst.i.tious fetish-wors.h.i.+p of lazy or fascinated fancy! O this, indeed, deserves to be dwelt on.