I do not know if any one has remarked that rural and primitive folk can never bring themselves to believe of any foreign tongue that it is real human language like their own. To them it seems a jargon of meaningless and uncouth sounds.
Chanet, a follower of Descartes, said that he would believe that beasts thought when a beast told him so. By what cries of pain, by what looks of love, have not beasts told men that they thought! Man himself does not think in words in moments of profound emotion, whether of grief or joy. He cries out or he acts. Thought in its absolutely elementary form is action. The mother thinks in the kiss she gives her child. The musician thinks in music. Perhaps God thinks in constellations. I asked a man who had saved many lives by jumping into the sea, “What did you think of at the moment of doing it?” He replied: “You do not think, or you might not do it.”
The whole trend of philosophic speculation worthy of the name lies towards unity, but the Cartesian theory would arbitrarily divide even man’s physical and sensational nature from that of the other animals. To remedy this, Descartes admitted that man was just as much an automatic machine as other creatures. By what right, then, does he complain when he happens to have a toothache? Because, says Descartes triumphantly, man has an immortal soul! The child thinks in his mother’s womb, but the dog, which after scenting two roads takes the third without demur, sure that his master must have gone that way, this dog is acting “by springs” and neither thinks nor feels at all.
The misuse of the ill-treated word “Nature” cannot hide the fact that the beginning, middle, and end of Descartes’ argument rests on a perpetually recurrent miracle. Descartes confessed as much when he said that God could make animals as machines, so why should it be impossible that He had made them as machines? Voltaire’s clear reason revolted at this logic; he declared it to be absurd to imagine that God had given animals organs of feeling in order that they might not feel. He would have endorsed Professor Romanes’ saying that “the theory of animal automatism which is usually attributed to Descartes can never be accepted by common sense.”
On the other hand, while Descartes was being persecuted by the Church for opinions which he did not hold, this particular opinion of his was seized upon by Catholic divines as a vindication of creation. Pascal so regarded it. The miraculous element in it did not disturb him. Malebranche said though opposed by reason it was approved by faith.
Descartes said that the idea that animals think and feel is a relic of childhood. The idea that they do not think and feel might be more truly called a relic of that darkest side of perverse childhood, the existence of which we are all fain to forget. Whoever has seen a little child throwing stones at a toad on the highway—and sad because his hands are too small to take up the bigger stones to throw—will understand what I mean. I do not wish to allude more than slightly to a point which is of too much importance to pass over in silence. Descartes was a vivisector: so were the pious people at Port Royal who embraced his teaching with enthusiasm, and liked to hear the howls of the dogs they vivisected. M. Émile Ferrière, in his work “L’âme est la fonction du cerveau,” sees in the “souls” of beasts exactly the same nature as in the “soul” of man; the difference, he maintains, is one of degree; though generally inferior, it is sometimes superior to “souls” of certain human groups. Here is a candid materialist who deserves respect. But there is a school of physiologists nowadays which carries on an unflagging campaign in favour of belief in unconscious animal machines which work by springs, while denying that there is a God to wind up the springs, and in conscious human machines, while denying that there is a soul, independent of matter, which might account for the difference. “The wish is father to the thought.” Non ragionam di lor ma guarda e passa.
The strongest of all reasons for dismissing the machine theory of animals is their variety of idiosyncrasy. It is said that to the shepherd no two sheep look alike; it is certain that no two animals of any kind have the same characters. Some are selfish, some are unselfish, some are gentle, some irretrievably ill-tempered both to each other and to man. Some animals do not show much regret at the loss of their offspring, with others it is manifestly the reverse. Édouard Quinet described how on one occasion, when visiting the lions’ cage in the Jardin des Plantes, he observed the lion gently place his large paw on the forehead of the lioness, and so they remained, grave and still, all the time he was there. He asked Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who was with him, what it meant. “Their lion cub,” was the answer, “died this morning.” “Pity, benevolence, sympathy, could be read on those rugged faces.” That these qualities are often absent in sentient beings what man can doubt? But they are not to be found in the best mechanical animals in all Nuremberg!
Nor do machines commonly act as did the dog in the following true story which relates to something that happened during the earthquake of Ash Wednesday, 1887. At a place called Ceriana on the Italian Riviera a poor man who earned his living as a milk-carrier was supposed to have gone on his ordinary rounds, on which he was used to start at four o’clock in the morning. No one, therefore, thought of inquiring about him, but the fact was, that having taken a glass or two of wine in honour of the last night of the Carnival, he had overslept himself, and was still asleep when his cottage fell down upon him. He had a large dog which drew the little cart bearing the milk up the mountain paths, and the dog by chance was outside and safe. He found out where his master lay and succeeded in clearing the masonry so as to uncover his head, which was bleeding. He then set to work to lick the wounds; but, seeing that they went on bleeding, and also that he could not liberate the rest of the body, he started in search of help, running up and down among the surrounding ruins till he met some one, whom he caught hold of by the clothes. The man, however, thought that the dog was mad and fled for his life. Luckily, another man guessed the truth and allowed himself to be guided to the spot. History repeats itself, at least the history of devoted dogs. The same thing happened after the greater earthquake at Messina, when a man, one of the last to be saved, was discovered through the insistence of his little dog, who approached a group of searchers and whined piteously till he persuaded them to follow him to the ruins which concealed his master.
Nor, again, do machines act like a cockatoo I heard of from a witness of the scene. A lady was visiting the zoological gardens in a German town with her daughter, when the little girl was seized with the wish to possess a pretty moulted feather which was lying on the ground in the parrots’ cage. She made several attempts to reach it, but in vain. Seeing which, an old cockatoo hopped solemnly from the back of the cage and taking up the feather in his beak, handed it to the child with an air of the greatest politeness.
One of the first upholders of the idea of legislative protection of animals was Jeremy Bentham, who asked why the law should refuse its protection to any sensitive being? Most people forget the degree of opposition which was encountered by the earlier combatants of cruel practices and pastimes in England. Cobbett made a furious attack on a clergyman who (to his honour) was agitating for the suppression of bull-baiting, “the poor man’s sport,” as Cobbett called it. That it demoralised the poor man as well as tormented the bull never entered into the head of the inimitable wielder of English prose, pure and undefiled, who took it under his (happily) ineffectual protection. “The common law fully sanctions the baiting of bulls,” he wrote, “and, I believe, that to sell the flesh of a bull which has not been baited is an offence which is punishable by that very law to which you appeal” (“Political Register,” June, 1802).