What are the effects of this eternal power that dwells essentially
in nature? I see only two classes of them, the insensitive and the
sensitive.
The earth, the seas, the planets, the suns, seem admirable but
lifeless things, devoid of sensibility. A snail that wills, has some
degree of perception, and makes love, seems, to that extent, to have
an advantage greater than all the glory of the suns that illumine
space.
But all these beings are alike subject to eternal and unvarying laws.
Neither the sun, nor the snail, nor the oyster, nor the dog, nor the
ape, nor man, has given himself any one of the things which he has;
it is evident that they have received everything.
Man and the dog are born, unwittingly, of a mother who has brought
them into the world in spite of herself. Both of them suck the
mother’s breast without knowing what they do, and they do this in
virtue of a very delicate and complex mechanism, the nature of which
is known to few men.
Both of them have, after a time, ideas, memory, and will; the dog
much earlier than the man.
If the animals were mere machines, it would be another argument for
the position of those who believe that man also is a mere machine;
but there are now none who do not admit that the animals have ideas,
memory, and a measure of intelligence, and that they improve their
knowledge; that a hunting-dog learns its work, an old fox is more
astute than a young one, and so on.
Whence have they these faculties, if not from the primordial eternal
cause, the principle of action, the great being that animates the
whole of nature?
Man obtains the faculties of the animals much later than they, but in
a higher degree; can he obtain them from any other source?
He has nothing but what the great being has given him. It would
be a strange contradiction, a singular absurdity, if all the
stars and elements, the animals and plants, obeyed, unceasingly
and irresistibly, the laws of the great being, and man alone were
independent of them.