But it is confessed
that little has been satisfactorily made out concerning the nature and
limitations of instinct. In former times the habits and mental
characteristics of those orders of animated being which are inferior to
man were observed with but a careless eye; and it was late before the
phenomena of animal life received a careful and reverent examination.
It is vain to inquire what instinct is, before there has been an
accurate observation of its manifestations. It is only from its outward
manifestations that we can know anything of that marvellous inward
nature which is given to animals. We cannot know anything of the
essential constitution of mind, but can know only its properties. This
is all we know even of matter. "If material existence," says Sir
William Hamilton, "could exhibit ten thousand phenomena, and if we
possessed ten thousand senses to apprehend these ten thousand phenomena
of material existence, of existence absolutely and in itself we should
be then as ignorant as we are at present." But this limitation of human
knowledge has not always been kept in view. Men have been solicitous to
penetrate into the higher mysteries of absolute and essential
existence. But in thus reaching out after the unattainable, we have
often passed by the only knowledge which it was possible for us to
gain.
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