Has this question, then, made so much progress, either to the profit of animals or the detriment of mankind, that we should wish to stop it, when it has started already on so straight a path? Saint Chrysostom reproached the Gentile philosopher, it is said, with having always been inclined to assimilate that which they called the soul of animals with that of man himself.[60] The opinion of these Gentiles, nevertheless, is worth the trouble of being noticed. They were as well able to observe animals as ourselves. Since then, the means of study, as applied to intellect, have made little or no progress; observation and reflection are still the same; we have found no new process, no new method, by which we can more profoundly examine into this subject; we have, then, no reason to think that the solutions given by ourselves upon this point are at all preferable to those of the ancients. It may be rather the contrary. For their opinion has this much in its favour, that it was born free, in minds which did not restrain, even unwittingly, any new influence or theory which might be brought forward.[61] The idea of the intellectual gradation from man to animals must have been necessarily offensive to Christianity, which promised a future existence; it was not so for these Gentiles, who were much more occupied with matters of the world.[62]
The principles which we are endeavouring to revive are not, however, completely those of Aristotle. In his treatise on the soul he admits this gradation, but as presenting in each degree a new manifestation beyond the manifestations existing in the inferior degrees. The principle of the soul is unity; but as we reascend the series, from plants to man, it invests itself with a greatly increased number of faculties. Porphyrius, resuming the ideas of the Stagyrite, seems to go even further, and to approach nearer the truth; it is not faculties joined one to another that he recognises in man and animals, but the same in all, only more or less developed.[63]
At the present day, if we have not returned to the ideas of Pythagoras and the Stoics, at least we are very far from Pereira and Descartes, with their animal machines, hydraulic-pneumatic machines, as one of the partisans of the Bréton philosopher (J. H. Crocius) calls them.[64]
We are really astonished at the infatuation for the opinions of Descartes which took possession of Germany during the latter half of the seventeenth century. They were pushed to the extreme point,—soul, reason, and intellect were denied to all animals. A person named Stahl,[65] who had at least the merit of being consistent to the last, brings forward a principle, that animals do not feel, bruta non sentire. This announcement is the conclusion of a very learned syllogism, and which one Gaspard Laugenhert had added to the Compendium Physicæ of Arnold Geulinx.
It is with much trouble that some strong minds have dared to raise their voices in this Cartesian concert, having taken good care to strengthen themselves by plenty of quotations gathered from the Old and New Testaments.[66] These were then proofs positive, and at times it was prudent to use them. The side of the animals has been successively strengthened by Buffon, and indeed by everybody. At the present day, M. Flourens refuses them thought alone, “this supreme faculty which the mind of man possesses, so that it may rely upon itself, and study its own mind.[67] There is here,” says the physiologist of whom we are speaking, “a strong line of demarcation; this thought which can reason about itself,—this intellect which beholds and studies itself,—this knowledge which is acquainted with itself,—evidently forms an order of determined phenomena of a clearly defined nature, and to which no animal would know how to attain. There is a purely intellectual world, if we may say so, and this world belongs only to man. In one word, animals feel, understand, think; but man is the only one among all created beings to whom the power has been given of feeling that he feels, of knowing that he understands, and of thinking that he has the power of thinking.”[68]
Such is the only difference. The question is now reduced to a more limited field than it has ever been before, and infinitely less vast. The thing which would be wanting in animals is a kind of internal knowledge; not the knowledge of oneself (they know this since they feel) but the scientific knowledge of oneself, which can bring reflecting and reasoning study to bear on all the interior phenomena which may occur to each. We desire fully that this may be a distinction, but solely a secondary one, and able at most to make certain races of men differ one from the other. In fact, if we form an absolute and fundamental character of humanity out of this faculty, this power of investigation into an interior world, we ought to find it in a powerful manner among all men. It will resist every other influence, it will be permanent, since, this being destroyed, man would be no longer a man, and would be lowered by this fact to the rank whence he is said to have come.
And do we consider that it may possibly be so? Does this reflected knowledge of oneself exist among inferior races, if it does not exist among animals? Certainly we shall never maintain that these last enjoy such a faculty, the source of all our legislation, and that which has made us what we are. But we ask if it is well proved whether all human races possess it. If we do not allow innate ideas to the orang, as F. Cuvier[69] would do, be it so, but let it be remembered that certain philosophers have refused them to man himself. We ourselves agree that an animal has no abstract notion of right or duty, or any idea of a divinity,[70] but it must also be remembered that certain people have not even a word for the purpose of expressing these things, and it is M. de Quatrefages himself who avows it.[71]
We refer these persons to the following account of animal economy, and we think that they will not deny their application to various African and Oceanic tribes. “Ideas, abstract ideas, arise from their own domain; the past, that which preceded their birth; the future, that which will follow their death, does not occupy their attention; the present is their only business in life. They do not demand ‘Whence do I come? What am I? Where am I going?’ And they have no idea whatsoever of a Divinity.”[72] Bayle, Maupertuis,[73] and M. Flourens have, one after another, declared how difficult it is to fix a limit, to say where the intellect of animals ceases, and where that of man commences. That limit escapes even ourselves; whilst separating two terms specifically distinct we only see one continued line from the other vertebrate animals to mankind, without any clearly defined demarcation,—the organism only of one mammifer as separated by an unbroken limit from the organism of another. It is a chain of which the links, if we wish, may go on increasing from one extremity to the other, following a given progression, but without ceasing to be like, and consequently comparable amongst themselves. A certain number of links may be wanting, but the mind re-establishes them, and the continuity, although an abstraction, is not the less real. It is even, if we may say so, the track of a hyperbolic curve, interrupted here and there, of which only the arcs remain, quite different, and all, however, reducible by the mind to one and the same system.
Unity of composition is the condition of all harmony, the necessary rule of nature. As to ourselves, we only see everywhere the same faculties, extended and developed among the superior vertebrate animals; having even acquired among mankind the singular property of aggrandising itself almost ad infinitum, confined among other vertebrata, enclosed in a small circle, where they can even escape our own means of knowledge.
But there is everywhere the same nature, everywhere things are alike. Life is unity; we do not share it one with another; both the life of the body and the life of intellect, both matter and the mind, and the organism and the faculties,[74] belong to each one separately. Terms correlative one to the other, never independent. There is an immense space between the intellect of animals and that of a civilised European; we willingly recognise this, but encumbered by mean terms and numerous transitions; that these latter exist, or that they have finished their time upon our planet, we also allow. The question of language, so confused, and so full of obscurity, still remains.