“When I meet, amongst the more moderate opinions, arguments which go to prove our close resemblance to other animals, and how much they share in our greatest privileges, and with how much of probability they are compared to us, of a truth I abate much from our common presumption, and willingly abdicate that imaginary royalty which they assign us over other beings.”
Wiser than the majority in later times, Montaigne well rebukes the arrogant presumption of the human animal who affects to hold all other life to be brought into being for his sole use and pleasure:—
“Let him shew me, by the most skilful argument, upon what foundations he has built these excessive prerogatives which he supposes himself to have over other existences. Who has persuaded him that that admirable impulse of the celestial vault, the eternal brightness of those Lights rolling so majestically over our heads, the tremendous motions of that infinite sea of Globes, were established and have continued so many ages for his advantage and for his service. Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as that this pitiful [chétive], miserable creature, who is not even master of himself, exposed to injuries of every kind, should call itself master and lord of the universe, of which, so far from being lord of it, he knows but the smallest part?... Who has given him this sealed charter? Let him shew us the ‘letters patent’ of this grand commission. Have they been issued [octroyées] in favour of the wise only? They affect but the few in that case. The fools and the wicked—are they worthy of so extraordinary a favour, and being the worst part of the world [le pire pièce du monde], do they deserve to be preferred to all the rest? Shall we believe all this?
“Presumption is our natural and original disease. The most calamitous and fragile of all creatures is man, and yet the most arrogant.[114] It is through the vanity of this same imagination that he equals himself to a god, that he attributes to himself divine conditions, that he picks himself out and separates himself from the crowd of other creatures, curtails the just shares of other animals his brethren [confrères] and companions, and assigns to them such portions of faculties and forces as seems to him good. How does he know, by the effort of his intelligence, the interior and secret movements and impulses of other animals? By what comparison between them and us does he infer the stupidity [la bétise] which he attributes to them?”
Montaigne quotes the example of his master, the just and benevolent Plutarch, who made it a matter of justice and conscience not to sell or send to the slaughter-house (according to the common selfish ingratitude) a Cow who had served him faithfully and profitably for so many years. With Plutarch and Porphyry he never wearies of denouncing the unreasoning opinions, or rather prejudices, prevalent amongst men as to the mental qualities of many of the non-human races, and, as we have already seen, insists that the difference between them and us is of degree and not of kind:—
“Plato, in his picture of the ‘Golden Age,’ reckons amongst the chief advantages of the men of that time the communication they had with other animals, by investigating and instructing themselves in whose nature they learned their true qualities and the differences between them, by which they acquired a very perfect knowledge and intelligence, and thus made their lives more happy than we can make ours. Is a better test needed by which to judge of human folly in regard to other species?
“I have said all this in order to bring us back and reunite ourselves to the crowd [presse]. We are [in the accidents of mortality] neither above nor below the rest. ‘All who are under the sky,’ says the Jewish sage, ‘experience a like law and fate.’ There is some difference, there are orders and degrees, but they are under the aspect of one and the same nature. Man must be constrained and ranged within the barriers of this police [Il faut contraindre l’homme, et le ranger dans les barrières de cette police]. The wretch has no right to encroach [d’enjamber] beyond these; he is fettered, entangled, he is subjected to like necessities with other creatures of his order, and in a very mean condition without any true and essential prerogative and pre-excellence. That which he confers upon himself by his own opinion and fancy has neither sense nor substance; and if it be conceded to him that he alone of all animals has that freedom of imagination and that irregularity of thought representing to him what he is, what he is not, and what he wants, the false and the true, it is an advantage which has been very dearly sold to him, and of which he has very little to boast, for from that springs the principal source of the evils which oppress him—crime, disease, irresolution, trouble, despair.”
Rejecting the still received prejudice which will not allow our humble fellow-beings the privilege of reason, but invents an imaginary faculty called “instinct,” he repeats that—
“There is no ground for supposing that other beings do by natural and necessary inclination the same things that we do by choice, and while we are bound to infer from like effects like faculties—nay, from greater effects, greater faculties—we are forced to confess, consequently, that that same reason, that same method which we employ in action are also employed by the lower animals, or else that they have some still better reason or method. Why do we fancy in them that natural necessity or impulse [contrainte]—we who have no experience of that sort ourselves.[115]
“As for use in eating, it is with us as with them, natural and without instruction. Who doubts that a child, arrived at the necessary strength for feeding itself, could find its own nourishment? The earth produces and offers to him enough for his needs without artificial labour, and if not for all seasons, neither does she for the other races—witness the provisions which we observe the ants and others collecting for the sterile seasons of the year. Those nations whom we have lately discovered [the peoples of Hindustan and of parts of America], so abundantly furnished with natural meat and drink without care and without labour, have just instructed us that bread is not our sole food, and that without toil our mother Nature has furnished us with every plant we need, to shew us, as it seems, how superior she is to all our artificiality; while the extravagance of our appetite outruns all the inventions by which we seek to satisfy it.”[116]