N.B.--Let the determined skeptic answer these essays if he can, and if he can not, let him be an honest man and surrender.
MIND AND INSTINCT, OR STRICTURES UPON THE TEACHINGS OF EVOLUTIONISTS.
The evolution imagination ventures to affirm that man's intellectual superiority over the brute "is not _qualitative_ but _quantitative_." Then it follows, of necessity, that intellectually considered the brute is the image of man just as much as man is the image of God, the difference being _quantitative_ and not _qualitative_. Evolutionists claim that "man's superiority over the brute results from greater complexity and superior development of the brain." Now if man, as they say, once lived the life of the brute, and his superiority now is simply quantitative, why is it that his inferiors of to-day are not passing into real manhood? They are far superior to any creature which is "not far from the tadpole stage of evolution." If we were once there, and evolutionists say we were, why not take all brutes in as our _kins-folk_.
Now, since evolutionists have learned the secret of mind-making by training dogs and other animals to certain habits, and giving time for heredity to transmit those habits, they being "immediately petrified in brain structure," why should we not go to work and bring about a millennial glory, at least by the third or fourth generation? If so much has been overcome as lies between man and the tadpole, with the tadpole capital only to work upon, perhaps we might, with our present capital, bring into existence a race of gods. Why not? We are taught that "instinct is habit petrified in brain structure and transmitted by heredity," that it is, consequently, "organized ancestral experiences that are the source of instinct, but not always." Why this modification in the teachings of evolutionists? Do they not know that the acknowledgment of the existence of an original instinctive endowment breaks down the whole theory of mind-being from environments? And what right have Atheists to claim instinct as an original endowment, in certain cases? The very idea is destructive of their speculation, for in order to an original endowment, as they term it, over and above that which is the result of ancestral experiences petrified in brain structure and transmitted, there must be the endowment, that which endows, and the endowed. These three things stand or fall together. But why should they claim this exception of an original endowment? The answer is easy. Facts that are utterly against them are known to exist in the world of instincts. We have an example in the instinct of the honey bee. Neither the drone nor the queen ever built a cell. So this is conceded to be an original endowment. O, ye evolutionists! will you tell us where this cell-building instinct came from? You claim that it was, or is, an original endowment. _From whom?_ Again you tell us that instinct depends upon brain structure in every instance; then what is the difference between instinct and intellect or mind? You tell us that mind also depends on brain structure, and you say that intelligence is unlike instinct, because it works by experience, not ancestral, but, on the contrary, by individual experience.