OF THE SOUL OF ANIMALS, AND OF SOME EMPTY IDEASBefore the strange system which supposes animals to be pure machines without any sensation, men had never thought that the beasts possessed an immaterial soul; and nobody had pushed recklessness to the point of saying that an oyster has a spiritual soul.Everyone concurred peaceably in agreeing that the beasts had received from God feeling, memory, ideas, and no pure spirit.Nobody had abused the gift of reason to the point of saying that nature had given the beasts all the organs of feeling so that they might not feel anything.Nobody had said that they cry when they are wounded, and that they fly when pursued, without experiencing pain or fear.
At that time people did not deny the omnipotence of God; He had been able to communicate to the organized matter of animals pleasure, pain, remembrance, the combination of a few ideas; He had been able to give to several of them, such as the monkey, the elephant, the hunting-dog, the talent of perfecting themselves in the arts which were taught to them;not only had He been able to endow nearly all carnivorous animals with the talent of warring better in their experienced old age than in their too trustful youth; not only, I say, had He been able to do these things, but He had done them: the universe bore witness thereto.
Pereira and Descartes maintained that the universe was mistaken, that God was a juggler, that He had given animals all the instruments of life and sensation, so that they might have neither life nor sensation, properly speaking.But I do not know what so-called philosophers, in order to answer Descartes' chimera, leaped into the opposite chimera; they gave liberally of pure spirit to the toads and the insects.
Between these two madnesses, the one refusing feeling to the organs of feeling, the other lodging a pure spirit in a bug, somebody thought of a middle path.It was instinct.And what is instinct? Oh, oh, it is a substantial form; it is a plastic form; it is I do not know what; it is instinct.I shall be of your opinion so long as you will call the majority of things, " I do not know what "; so long as your philosophy begins and ends with " I do not know what", I shall quote Prior to you in his poem on the vanity of the world.
The author of the article SOUL in the " Encyclopedia " explains himself like this:-" I picture the animals' soul as an immaterial and intelligent substance, but of what species? It must, it seems to me, be an active principle which has sensations, and which has only that....If we reflect on the nature of the soul of animals, it supplies us with groundwork which might lead us to think that its spirituality will save it from annihilation."I do not know how one pictures an immaterial substance.To picture something is to make an image of it; and up till now nobody has been able to paint the spirit.For the word " picture '', I want the author to understand '' I conceive '' ; speaking for myself, I confess I do not conceive it.
I confess still less that a spiritual soul may be annihilated, because I do not conceive either creation or non-existence; because I have never been present at God's council; because I know nothing at all about the principle of things.
