The Sense of the Beautiful in Brutes [pp. 126-142]

BEAUTIFUL IN BRUTES.
This question enters into a vaster problem, which consists in examining whether instinct and intelligence are only two extreme
forms of one and the same mental energy. The most penetrating
minds, the keenest observers of antiquity and modern times, Aristotle and Buffon, Plutarch and Montaigne, and among cootemporaries F. Cuvier, Flourens, Gratiolet, MM. E. Blanchard, Milne
Edwards, P'ouchet, Brehm, have discussed it. Why have they not
found the definite solution of it? Because a more complex problem does not exist. Has MZr. Darwin, who has taken it up with
so much knowledge, interest, and good faith, maturely weighed
its difficulties, comprehended and analyzed its method, perceived
and measured its conditions?
Of these conditions, the first evidently was to institute at the
outset a minute analysis of those mental faculties which the animal, we are told, possesses like ourselves, only with great and
very numerous differences of degree. It was indispensable, before comparing, clearly to set forth the terms of the comparison.
To have the right to identify instinct with intelligence, to be justified in raising instinct to a level with sentiment and mesthetic
judgment, the method necessitated that intelligence and instinct
should be considered and analyzed separately. Mr. Darwin seems
to have dispensed with this obligation, or rather hle seems not
to have felt it. He declares that he will not attempt to define
instinct, because, according to him, instinct does not present
any of those constant characteristics on which definition depends.
He contents himself with affirming that instinct always includes
a portion of intelligence, without seeking to disengage this intellectual element, and without doubting that he has reached the
root of the matter. The distinction of the different faculties of
the mind no longer occupies him; he characterises them at best
vaguely, so vaguely that he more than once confounds reasoning
with reason. In short, although the sentiment of the beautiful
plays a principal part in his doctrine, he has nowhere taken the
trouble to penetrate to the essence of this delicate power of the
soul; he has nowhere asked whether the sentiment of the beautiful is a mere sensation, whether it is preceded by an idea,
whether it borders upon a judgmnent. Even his partisans acknowledge that his psychology is exceedingly weak and superficial, and it is on this uncertain base that he has constructed his
whole edifice of sexual selection; it is through a fog he pretends
9
133
1874.]