[CHAPTER VI.]
GENERAL DIFFERENCES OF THE TWO LIVES WITH RESPECT TO MENTAL AFFECTION.
It is necessary to consider, under two relations, those acts, which little connected with the material organization of animals, are derived from this principle so little known in its nature, but so remarkable as to its effects, the centre of all their voluntary motions, and on the subject of which, there would have been less dispute, if philosophers, instead of attempting to reach its essence, had been contented with analyzing its operations. These actions, which we shall consider more especially in man, with whom they are the most perfect, are either purely intellectual, and relative to the understanding only; or they are the immediate product of the passions. Examined under the first point of view, they are the exclusive attribute of the animal, under the second of the organic life.
I. Whatever relates to the understanding belongs to the animal life.
It would be useless for me to insist on proving that meditation, reflection, the judgment, and all the operations of the mind depending upon an association of ideas are under the dominion of the animal life. We judge from impressions formerly or actually received, or from those which we ourselves create. Perception, memory, and the imagination are the principal bases, on which are founded the operations of the mind, but these very bases themselves repose upon the action of the senses.
Let us suppose a man at his birth to be deprived of all that exterior apparatus, which is destined to establish his connexions with surrounding objects; such man will not altogether be the statue of Condillac, because, as we shall see hereafter, other causes besides the sensations, may occasion within him the motions of the animal life; but at least will he not be able, a stranger as he is to every thing surrounding him, to form any judgment with respect to things. The intellectual functions with him will be null; volition, which is the consequence of these functions, will not have place, and consequently, that very extensive class of motions which has its immediate seat in the brain, and which itself is but an effect of the impressions made there, will in nowise belong to him.
It is by means of the animal life that man is so great, so superior to the beings, which surround him; by means of this that he possesses the sciences, the arts, and every thing which places him at a distance from the gross elements under which we represent brute matter; by this that he approaches spirituality; for industry and commerce, and whatever enlarges the narrow circle within which the efforts of other animals are confined, are exclusively under the dominion of the animal life of man.
The actual state of society then is nothing but a more regular development, a more marked perfection of the exercise of the different functions of this life; for one of its greatest characters as I shall hereafter prove, consists in its capability of being unfolded, while, in the organic life, there does not exist a part, which in the least degree may pass the limits which are set to it by nature. We live organically in as perfect, in as regular a way, when infants, as when men; but what is the animal life of the child compared with that of the man of thirty years of age?