11. What is the most perfect degree of sensitive life? What the most imperfect? These questions we cannot answer, for we cannot judge of these things otherwise than by experience and analogy. But viewing the immensity of the scale, experience shows us we may infer that nature is far richer than we imagine. Let us not disturb its profound secrets, but be content to suspect that they exist.
[CHAPTER II.]
MATTER IS INCAPABLE OF SENSATION.
12. The phenomenon of sensibility reveals to us the existence of an order of beings distinct from matter. However perfect we may suppose material organization, it cannot rise to sensation; matter is wholly incapable of sensation; and the absurd system of materialism can neither explain the phenomena of intelligence, nor even of sensation.
It is of little consequence to us that we do not know the intrinsical nature of sensitive being, or of matter; it is enough to know their essential properties, in order to infer with certainty that they belong to distinct orders. It is not true that the principal idea of the essence of things is necessary, in order to demonstrate their absolute contradiction; thousands of times we consider two geometrical figures whose essential property we do not know; yet not, therefore, do we fail to see that they are different, and that one cannot possibly be the other.
Matter, whatever opinion may be entertained of its essential property, is necessarily a composite being; matter without parts, is not matter. A composite being, although called one, inasmuch as its parts are united together, and conspire to the same end, is always a collection of many beings; for the parts though united are still distinct If sensation could be predicated of a composite being, the sensitive would not be a single being, but a collection of beings; but sensation essentially belongs to a being which is one, and if divided is destroyed; therefore, no composite being, however well organized, is capable of sensation.
If we observe what takes place in us, and reason from analogy, to other sensitive beings, we shall discover amid the variety of sensations a single being which perceives them; it is one and the same being that hears, sees, touches, smells, and tastes; that remembers sensations after they have disappeared; that seeks them when agreeable, and avoids them when unpleasant, enjoys the former and suffers in the latter. All this enters into the idea of sensitive being; if brutes had not this common subject of all sensations; were they not one in the midst of multiplicity, identical in diversity, and permanent under succession, they would not be sensitive beings, such as we conceive them to be; they would have no sensation, properly so called; for there is no sensation, in the sense in which we here understand it, without a being affected by it, a being which perceives it.
If we imagine a flow and ebb of sensations without any connection, without a constant being to experience them, the result will not be a sensitive being, but a collection of phenomena, each one of which by itself alone offers the same difficulty as all united, the necessity of a being to experience it.
13. Let us take a being composed of two parts, A and B, and see if it can acquire, for instance, the sensation of sound. If both parts perceive, either both perceive the whole sound, or each a portion of it. If both perceive it entire, one of them is superfluous, for we are only seeking to explain the realization of the phenomenon, which would thus be verified in one alone. If each part hear the sound, not entire, but only a portion of it, we shall have a divided sound; and what is the division of a sound?