To return to what I was saying before, I am tenderly compassionate of

others’ afflictions, and should readily cry for company, if, upon any

occasion whatever, I could cry at all. Nothing tempts my tears but

tears, and not only those that are real and true, but whatever they are,

feigned or painted. I do not much lament the dead, and should envy them

rather; but I very much lament the dying. The savages do not so much

offend me, in roasting and eating the bodies of the dead, as they do who

torment and persecute the living. Nay, I cannot look so much as upon the

ordinary executions of justice, how reasonable soever, with a steady eye.

Some one having to give testimony of Julius Caesar’s clemency; “he was,”

says he, “mild in his revenges. Having compelled the pirates to yield by

whom he had before been taken prisoner and put to ransom; forasmuch as he

had threatened them with the cross, he indeed condemned them to it, but

it was after they had been first strangled. He punished his secretary

Philemon, who had attempted to poison him, with no greater severity than

mere death.” Without naming that Latin author,--[Suetonius, Life of

Casay, c. 74.]--who thus dares to allege as a testimony of mercy the

killing only of those by whom we have been offended; it is easy to guess

that he was struck with the horrid and inhuman examples of cruelty

practised by the Roman tyrants.

For my part, even in justice itself, all that exceeds a simple death

appears to me pure cruelty; especially in us who ought, having regard to

their souls, to dismiss them in a good and calm condition; which cannot

be, when we have agitated them by insufferable torments. Not long since,

a soldier who was a prisoner, perceiving from a tower where he was shut

up, that the people began to assemble to the place of execution, and that

the carpenters were busy erecting a scaffold, he presently concluded

that the preparation was for him, and therefore entered into a resolution

to kill himself, but could find no instrument to assist him in his design

except an old rusty cart-nail that fortune presented to him; with this he

first gave himself two great wounds about his throat, but finding these

would not do, he presently afterwards gave himself a third in the belly,

where he left the nail sticking up to the head. The first of his keepers

who came in found him in this condition: yet alive, but sunk down and

exhausted by his wounds. To make use of time, therefore, before he

should die, they made haste to read his sentence; which having done, and

he hearing that he was only condemned to be beheaded, he seemed to take

new courage, accepted wine which he had before refused, and thanked his

judges for the unhoped-for mildness of their sentence; saying, that he

had taken a resolution to despatch himself for fear of a more severe and

insupportable death, having entertained an opinion, by the preparations

he had seen in the place, that they were resolved to torment him with

some horrible execution, and seemed to be delivered from death in having

it changed from what he apprehended.

I should advise that those examples of severity by which ‘tis designed to

retain the people in their duty, might be exercised upon the dead bodies

of criminals; for to see them deprived of sepulture, to see them boiled

and divided into quarters, would almost work as much upon the vulgar, as

the pain they make the living endure; though that in effect be little or

nothing, as God himself says, “Who kill the body, and after that have no

more that they can do;”--[Luke, xii. 4.]--and the poets singularly

dwell upon the horrors of this picture, as something worse than death:

“Heu! reliquias semiustas regis, denudatis ossibus,

Per terram sanie delibutas foede divexarier.”

[“Alas! that the half-burnt remains of the king, exposing his bones,

should be foully dragged along the ground besmeared with gore.”

--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 44.]

I happened to come by one day accidentally at Rome, just as they were

upon executing Catena, a notorious robber: he was strangled without any

emotion of the spectators, but when they came to cut him in quarters, the

hangman gave not a blow that the people did not follow with a doleful cry

and exclamation, as if every one had lent his sense of feeling to the

miserable carcase. Those inhuman excesses ought to be exercised upon the

bark, and not upon the quick. Artaxerxes, in almost a like case,

moderated the severity of the ancient laws of Persia, ordaining that the

nobility who had committed a fault, instead of being whipped, as they

were used to be, should be stripped only and their clothes whipped for

them; and that whereas they were wont to tear off their hair, they should

only take off their high-crowned tiara.’--[Plutarch, Notable Sayings of

the Ancient King.]--The so devout Egyptians thought they sufficiently

satisfied the divine justice by sacrificing hogs in effigy and

representation; a bold invention to pay God so essential a substance in

picture only and in show.

I live in a time wherein we abound in incredible examples of this vice,

through the licence of our civil wars; and we see nothing in ancient

histories more extreme than what we have proof of every day, but I

cannot, any the more, get used to it. I could hardly persuade myself,

before I saw it with my eyes, that there could be found souls so cruel

and fell, who, for the sole pleasure of murder, would commit it; would

hack and lop off the limbs of others; sharpen their wits to invent

unusual torments and new kinds of death, without hatred, without profit,

and for no other end but only to enjoy the pleasant spectacle of the

gestures and motions, the lamentable groans and cries of a man dying in

anguish. For this is the utmost point to which cruelty can arrive:

“Ut homo hominem, non iratus, non timens,

tantum spectaturus, occidat.”

[“That a man should kill a man, not being angry, not in fear, only

for the sake of the spectacle.”--Seneca, Ep., 90.]

For my own part, I cannot without grief see so much as an innocent beast

pursued and killed that has no defence, and from which we have received

no offence at all; and that which frequently happens, that the stag we

hunt, finding himself weak and out of breath, and seeing no other remedy,

surrenders himself to us who pursue him, imploring mercy by his tears:

“Questuque cruentus,

Atque imploranti similis,”

[“Who, bleeding, by his tears seems to crave mercy.”

--AEnead, vii. 501.]

has ever been to me a very unpleasing sight; and I hardly ever take a

beast alive that I do not presently turn out again. Pythagoras bought

them of fishermen and fowlers to do the same:

“Primoque a caede ferarum,

Incaluisse puto maculatum sanguine ferrum.”

[“I think ‘twas slaughter of wild beasts that first stained the

steel of man with blood.”--Ovid, Met., xv. 106.]

Those natures that are sanguinary towards beasts discover a natural

proneness to cruelty. After they had accustomed themselves at Rome to

spectacles of the slaughter of animals, they proceeded to those of the

slaughter of men, of gladiators. Nature has herself, I fear, imprinted

in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity; nobody takes pleasure in seeing

beasts play with and caress one another, but every one is delighted with

seeing them dismember, and tear one another to pieces. And that I may

not be laughed at for the sympathy I have with them, theology itself

enjoins us some favour in their behalf; and considering that one and the

same master has lodged us together in this palace for his service, and

that they, as well as we, are of his family, it has reason to enjoin us

some affection and regard to them. Pythagoras borrowed the

metempsychosis from the Egyptians; but it has since been received by

several nations, and particularly by our Druids:

“Morte carent animae; semperque, priore relicts

Sede, novis domibus vivunt, habitantque receptae.”

[“Souls never die, but, having left their former seat, live

and are received into new homes.”--Ovid, Met., xv. 158.]

The religion of our ancient Gauls maintained that souls, being eternal,

never ceased to remove and shift their places from one body to another;

mixing moreover with this fancy some consideration of divine justice; for

according to the deportments of the soul, whilst it had been in

Alexander, they said that God assigned it another body to inhabit, more

or less painful, and proper for its condition:

“Muta ferarum

Cogit vincla pati; truculentos ingerit ursis,

Praedonesque lupis; fallaces vulpibus addit:

Atque ubi per varios annos, per mille figuras

Egit, Lethaeo purgatos flumine, tandem

Rursus ad humanae revocat primordia formae:”

[“He makes them wear the silent chains of brutes, the bloodthirsty

souls he encloses in bears, the thieves in wolves, the deceivers in

foxes; where, after successive years and a thousand forms, man had

spent his life, and after purgation in Lethe’s flood, at last he

restores them to the primordial human shapes.”

--Claudian, In Ruf., ii. 482.]

If it had been valiant, he lodged it in the body of a lion; if

voluptuous, in that of a hog; if timorous, in that of a hart or hare; if

malicious, in that of a fox, and so of the rest, till having purified it

by this chastisement, it again entered into the body of some other man:

“Ipse ego nam memini, Trojani, tempore belli

Panthoides Euphorbus eram.”

[“For I myself remember that, in the days of the Trojan war, I was

Euphorbus, son of Pantheus.”--Ovid, Met., xv. 160; and see Diogenes

Laertius, Life of Pythagoras.]

As to the relationship betwixt us and beasts, I do not much admit of it;

nor of that which several nations, and those among the most ancient and

most noble, have practised, who have not only received brutes into their

society and companionship, but have given them a rank infinitely above

themselves, esteeming them one while familiars and favourites of the

gods, and having them in more than human reverence and respect; others

acknowledged no other god or divinity than they:

“Bellux a barbaris propter beneficium consecratae.”

[“Beasts, out of opinion of some benefit received by them, were

consecrated by barbarians”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., i. 36.]

“Crocodilon adorat

Pars haec; illa pavet saturam serpentibus ibin:

Effigies sacri hic nitet aurea cercopitheci;

Hic piscem flumints, illic

Oppida tota canem venerantur.”

[“This place adores the crocodile; another dreads the ibis, feeder

on serpents; here shines the golden image of the sacred ape; here

men venerate the fish of the river; there whole towns worship a

dog.”--Juvenal, xv. 2.]

And the very interpretation that Plutarch, gives to this error, which is

very well conceived, is advantageous to them: for he says that it was not

the cat or the ox, for example, that the Egyptians adored: but that they,

in those beasts, adored some image of the divine faculties; in this,

patience and utility: in that, vivacity, or, as with our neighbours the

Burgundians and all the Germans, impatience to see themselves shut up; by

which they represented liberty, which they loved and adored above all

other godlike attributes, and so of the rest. But when, amongst the more

moderate opinions, I meet with arguments that endeavour to demonstrate

the near resemblance betwixt us and animals, how large a share they have

in our greatest privileges, and with how much probability they compare us

together, truly I abate a great deal of our presumption, and willingly

resign that imaginary sovereignty that is attributed to us over other

creatures.

But supposing all this were not true, there is nevertheless a certain

respect, a general duty of humanity, not only to beasts that have life

and sense, but even to trees, and plants. We owe justice to men, and

graciousness and benignity to other creatures that are capable of it;

there is a certain commerce and mutual obligation betwixt them and us.

Nor shall I be afraid to confess the tenderness of my nature so childish,

that I cannot well refuse to play with my dog, when he the most

unseasonably importunes me to do so. The Turks have alms and hospitals

for beasts. The Romans had public care to the nourishment of geese, by

whose vigilance their Capitol had been preserved. The Athenians made a

decree that the mules and moyls which had served at the building of the

temple called Hecatompedon should be free and suffered to pasture at

their own choice, without hindrance. The Agrigentines had a common use

solemnly to inter the beasts they had a kindness for, as horses of some

rare quality, dogs, and useful birds, and even those that had only been

kept to divert their children; and the magnificence that was ordinary

with them in all other things, also particularly appeared in the

sumptuosity and numbers of monuments erected to this end, and which

remained in their beauty several ages after. The Egyptians buried

wolves, bears, crocodiles, dogs, and cats in sacred places, embalmed

their bodies, and put on mourning at their death. Cimon gave an

honourable sepulture to the mares with which he had three times gained

the prize of the course at the Olympic Games. The ancient Xantippus

caused his dog to be interred on an eminence near the sea, which has ever

since retained the name, and Plutarch says, that he had a scruple about

selling for a small profit to the slaughterer an ox that had been long in

his service.

Chapter XII. Apology For Raimond Sebond.

Learning is, indeed, a very great and a very material accomplishment;

and those who despise it sufficiently discover their own want of

understanding; but learning yet I do not prize it at the excessive rate

that some others do, as Herillus, the philosopher, for one, who therein

places the sovereign good, and maintained “That it was only in her to

render us wise and contented,” which I do not believe; no more than I

do what others have said, that learning is the mother of all virtue, and

that all vice proceeds from ignorance, which, if it be true, required

a very long interpretation. My house has long-been open to men of

knowledge, and is very well known to them; for my father, who governed

it fifty years and upwards, inflamed with the new ardour with which

Francis the First embraced letters, and brought them into esteem, with

great diligence and expense hunted after the acquaintance of learned

men, receiving them into his house as persons sacred, and that had some

particular inspiration of divine wisdom; collecting their sayings and

sentences as so many oracles, and with so much the greater reverence

and religion as he was the less able to judge of them; for he had no

knowledge of letters any more than his predecessors. For my part I love

them well, but I do not adore them. Amongst others, Peter Bunel, a man

of great reputation for knowledge in his time, having, with some others

of his sort, staid some days at Montaigne in my father’s company,

he presented him at his departure with a book, entitled _Theologia

naturalis; sive Liber Creaturarum, magistri Raimondi de Sebonde._ And as

the Italian and Spanish tongues were familiar to my father, and as this

book was written in a sort of jargon of Spanish with Latin terminations,

he hoped that, with a little help, he might be able to understand it,

and therefore recommended it to him for a very useful book, and proper

tor the time wherein he gave it to him; which was when the novel

doctrines of Luther began to be in vogue, and in many places to stagger

our ancient belief: wherein he was very well advised, wisely, in his own

reason, foreseeing that the beginning of this distemper would easily

run into an execrable atheism, for the vulgar, not having the faculty of

judging of things, suffering themselves to be carried away by chance and

appearance, after having once been inspired with the boldness to

despise and control those opinions which they had before had in extreme

reverence, such as those wherein their salvation is concerned, and

that some of the articles of their religion are brought into doubt and

dispute, they afterwards throw all other parts of their belief into the

same uncertainty, they having with them no other authority or foundation

than the others they had already discomposed; and shake off all the

impressions they had received from the authority of the laws, or the

reverence of the ancient customs, as a tyrannical yoke:

Nam cupide eonculcatur nimis ante metutum;

“For with most eagerness they spurn the law,

By which they were before most kept in awe;”

resolving to admit nothing for the future to which they had not first

interposed their own decrees, and given their particular consent.

It happened that my father, a little before his death, having

accidentally found this book under a heap of other neglected papers,

commanded me to translate it for him into French. It is good too

translate such authors as this, where there is little but the matter

itself to express; but such wherein grace of language and elegance of

style are aimed at, are dangerous to attempt, especially when a man is

to turn them into a weaker idiom. It was a strange and a new undertaking

for me; but having by chance at that time nothing else to do, and not

being able to resist the command of the best father that ever was, I did

it as well as I could; and he was so well pleased with it as to order it

to be printed, which after his death was done.

I found the ideas of this author exceeding fine the contexture of his

work well followed, and his design full of piety; and because many

people take a delight to read it, and particularly the ladies, to whom

we owe the most service, I have often thought to assist them to clear

the book of two principal objections made to it. His design is bold and

daring, for he undertakes, by human and natural reasons, to establish

and make good, against the atheists, all the articles of the Christian

religion: wherein, to speak the truth, he is so firm and so successful

that I do not think it possible to do better upon that subject; nay, I

believe he has been equalled by none. This work seeming to me to be too

beautiful and too rich for an author whose name is so little known, and

of whom all that we know is that he was a Spaniard, practising physic at

Toulouse about two hundred years ago; I enquired of Adrian Turnebus, who

knew all things, what he thought of that book; who made answer, “That he

thought it was some abstract drawn from St. Thomas d’Aquin; for that, in

truth, his mind, so full of infinite erudition and admirable subtlety,

was alone capable of such thoughts.” Be this as it may, whoever was the

author and inventor (and ‘tis not reasonable, without greater certainty,

to deprive Sebond of that title), he was a man of great judgment and

most admirable parts.

The first thing they reprehend in his work is “That Christians are to

blame to repose their belief upon human reason, which is only conceived

by faith and the particular inspiration of divine grace.” In which

objection there appears to be something of zeal to piety, and therefore

we are to endeavour to satisfy those who put it forth with the greater

mildness and respect. This were a task more proper for a man well

read in divinity than for me, who know nothing of it; nevertheless, I

conceive that in a thing so divine, so high, and so far transcending

all human intelligence, as is that truth, with which it has pleased

the bounty of God to enlighten us, it is very necessary that he should

moreover lend us his assistance, as a very extraordinary favour and

privilege, to conceive and imprint it in our understanding. And I do

not believe that means purely human are in any sort capable of doing it:

for, if they were, so many rare and excellent souls, and so abundantly

furnished with natural force, in former ages, could not have failed,

by their reason, to arrive at this knowledge. ‘Tis faith alone that

livelily mind certainly comprehends the deep mysteries of our religion;

but, withal, I do not say that it is not a worthy and very laudable

attempt to accommodate those natural and human utensils with which God

has endowed us to the service of our faith: it is not to be doubted but

that it is the most noble use we can put them to; and that there is not

a design in a Christian man more noble than to make it the aim and end

of all his studies to extend and amplify the truth of his belief. We do

not satisfy ourselves with serving God with our souls and understandings

only, we moreover owe and render him a corporal reverence, and apply our

limbs and motions, and external things to do him honour; we must here

do the same, and accompany our faith with all the reason we have, but

always with this reservation, not to fancy that it is upon us that

it depends, nor that our arguments and endeavours can arrive at so

supernatural and divine a knowledge. If it enters not into us by an

extraordinary infusion; if it enters not only by reason, but, moreover,

by human ways, it is not in us in its true dignity and splendour: and

yet, I am afraid, we only have it by this way.

If we hold upon God by the mediation of a lively faith; if we hold upon

God by him, and not by us; if we had a divine basis and foundation,

human occasions would not have the power to shake us as they do; our

fortress would not surrender to so weak a battery; the love of novelty,

the constraint of princes, the success of one party, and the rash and

fortuitous change of our opinions, would not have the power to stagger

and alter our belief: we should not then leave it to the mercy of every

new argument, nor abandon it to all the rhetoric in the world; we should

withstand the fury of these waves with an immovable and unyielding

constancy:

As a great rock repels the rolling tides,

That foam and bark about her marble sides,

From its strong bulk

If we were but touched with this ray of divinity, it would appear

throughout; not only our words, but our works also, would carry

its brightness and lustre; whatever proceeded from us would be seen

illuminated with this noble light. We ought to be ashamed that, in all

the human sects, there never was any of the faction, that did not, in

some measure, conform his life and behaviour to it, whereas so divine

and heavenly an institution does only distinguish Christians by the

name! Will you see the proof of this? Compare our manners to those of a

Mahometan or Pagan, you will still find that we fall very

short; there, where, out of regard to the reputation and advantage of

our religion, we ought to shine in excellency at a vast distance beyond

all others: and that it should be said of us, “Are they so just, so

charitable, so good: Then they are Christians.” All other signs are

common to all religions; hope, trust, events, ceremonies, penance,

martyrs. The peculiar mark of our truth ought to be our virtue, as it

is also the most heavenly and difficult, and the most worthy product

of truth. For this our good St. Louis was in the right, who, when the

Tartar king, who was become Christian, designed to come to Lyons to kiss

the Pope’s feet, and there to be an eye-witness of the sanctity he hoped

to find in our manner, immediately diverted him from his purpose; for

fear lest our disorderly way of living should, on the contrary, put

him out of conceit with so holy a belief! And yet it happened quite

otherwise since to that other, who, going to Rome, to the same end, and

there seeing the dissoluteness of the prelates and people of that time,

settled himself so much the more firmly in our religion, considering

how great the force and divinity of it must necessarily be that could

maintain its dignity and splendour among so much corruption, and in so

vicious hands. If we had but one single grain of faith, we should remove

mountains from their places, saith the sacred Word; our actions, that

would then be directed and accompanied by the divinity, would not be

merely human, they would have in them something of miraculous, as well

as our belief: _Brevis est institutio vitæ honestæ beauæque, si

credos._ “Believe, and the way to happiness and virtue is a short one.”

Some impose upon the world that they believe that which they do not;

others, more in number, make themselves believe that they believe, not

being able to penetrate into what it is to believe. We think it strange

if, in the civil war which, at this time, disorders our state, we see

events float and vary aller a common and ordinary manner; which is

because we bring nothing to it but our own. Justice, which is in one

party, is only there for ornament and palliation; it, is, indeed,

pretended, but ‘tis not there received, settled and espoused: it is

there, as in the mouth of an advocate, not as in the heart and affection

of the party. God owes his extraordinary assistance to faith and

religion; not to our passions. Men there are the conductors, and therein

serve themselves with religion, whereas it ought to be quite contrary.

Observe, if it be not by our own hands that we guide and train it, and

draw it like wax into so many contrary figures, from a rule in itself so

direct and firm. When and where was this more manifest than in France in

our days? They who have taken it on the left hand, they who have taken

it on the right; they who call it black, they who call it white, alike

employ it to their violent and ambitious designs, conduct it with

a progress, so conform in riot and injustice that they render the

diversity they pretended in their opinions, in a thing whereon the

conduct and rule of our life depends, doubtful and hard to believe. Did

one ever see, come from the same school and discipline, manners more

united, and more the same? Do but observe with what horrid impudence

we toss divine arguments to and fro, and how irreligiously we have both

rejected and retaken them, accord--as fortune has shifted our places in

these intestine storms.

This so solemn proposition, “Whether it be lawful for a subject to rebel

and take up arms against his prince for the defence of his religion,” do

you remember in whose mouths, the last year, the affirmative of it

was the prop of one party, and the negative the pillar of another? And

hearken now from what quarter comes the voice and instruction of the

one and the other, and if arms make less noise and rattle for this cause

than for that. We condemn those to the fire who say that truth must be

made to bear the yoke of our necessity; and how much worse does France

than say it? Let us confess the truth; whoever should draw out from the

army, even that raised by the king, those who take up arms out of pure

zeal to religion, and also those who only do it to protect the laws of

their country, or for the service of their prince, could hardly, out

of both these put together, make one complete company of gens-d’armes.

Whence does this proceed, that there are so few to be found who have

maintained the same will and the same progress in our civil commotions,

and that we see them one while move but a foot-pace, and another run

full speed? and the same men one while damage our affairs by their

violent heat and fierceness, and another by their coldness, gentleness,

and slowness; but that they are pushed on by particular and casual

considerations, according to the variety wherein they move?

I evidently perceive that we do not willingly afford devotion any other

offices but those that least suit with our own passions.

There hostility so admirable as the Christian. Our zeal performs

wonders, when it seconds our inclinations to hatred, cruelty, ambition,

avarice, detraction, and rebellion: but when it moves, against the hair,

towards bounty, benignity, and temperance, unless, by miracle, some

rare and virtuous disposition prompts us to it, we stir neither hand nor

toot. Our religion is intended to extirpate vices, whereas it screens,

nourishes, and incites them. We must not mock God. If we believed in

him, I do not say by faith, but with a simple belief, that is to say

(and I speak it to our great shame) if we believed in him and recognised

him as we do any other history, or as we would do one of our companions,

we should love him above all other things for the infinite bounty and

beauty that shines in him;--at least, he would go equal in our affection

with riches, pleasure, glory, and our friends. The best of us is not so

much afraid to outrage him as he is afraid to injure his neighbour, his

kinsman, or his master. Is there any understanding so weak that, having

on one side the object of one of our vicious pleasures, and on the other

(in equal knowledge and persuasion) the state of an immortal glory,

would change the first for the other? and yet we often renounce this out

of mere contempt: for what lust tempts us to blaspheme, if not, perhaps,

the very desire to offend. The philosopher Antisthenes, as he was being

initiated in the mysteries of Orpheus, the priest telling him, “That

those who professed themselves of that religion were certain to receive

perfect and eternal felicity after death,”--“If thou believest that,”

answered he, “why dost thou not die thyself?” Diogenes, more rudely,

according to his manner, and more remote from our purpose, to the priest

that in like manner preached to him, “To become of his religion, that he

might obtain the happiness of the other world;--“What!” said he, “thou

wouldest have me to believe that Agesilaus and Epaminondas, who were so

great men, shall be miserable, and that thou, who art but a calf, and

canst do nothing to purpose, shalt be happy, because thou art a priest?”

Did we receive these great promises of eternal beatitude with the same

reverence and respect that we do a philosophical discourse, we should

not have death in so great horror:

Non jam se moriens dissolvi conqurreretur;

Sed magis ire foras, stemque relinquere ut angais,

Gauderet, prealonga senex aut cornua cervus.

“We should not on a death bed grieve to be

Dissolved, but rather launch out cheerfully

From our old hut, and with the snake, be glad

To cast off the corrupted slough we had;

Or with th’ old stag rejoice to be now clear

From the large horns, too ponderous grown to bear.”

“I desire to be dissolved,” we should say, “and to be with Jesus Christ”

The force of Plato’s arguments concerning the immortality of the soul

set some of his disciples to seek a premature grave, that they might the

sooner enjoy the things he had made them hope for.

All this is a most evident sign that we only receive our religion

after our own fashion, by our own hands, and no otherwise than as other

religions are received. Either we are happened in the country where it

is in practice, or we reverence the antiquity of it, or the authority

of the men who have maintained it, or fear the menaces it fulminates

against misbelievers, or are allured by its promises. These

considerations ought, ‘tis true, to be applied to our belief but as

subsidiaries only, for they are human obligations. Another religion,

other witnesses, the like promises and threats, might, by the same way,

imprint a quite contrary belief. We are Christians by the same title

that we are Perigordians or Germans. And what Plato says, “That there

are few men so obstinate in their atheism whom a pressing danger will

not reduce to an acknowledgment of the divine power,” does not concern

a true Christian: ‘tis for mortal and human religions to be received by

human recommendation. What kind of faith can that be that cowardice and

want of courage establish in us? A pleasant faith, that does not believe

what it believes but for want of courage to disbelieve it! Can a vicious

passion, such as inconstancy and astonishment, cause any regular product

in our souls? “They are confident in their judgment,” says he, “that

what is said of hell and future torments is all feigned: but an occasion

of making the expedient presenting itself, when old age or diseases

bring them to the brink of the grave, the terror of death, by the horror

of that future condition, inspires them with a new belief!” And by

reason that such impressions render them timorous, he forbids in his

_Laws_ all such threatening doctrines, and all persuasion that anything

of ill can befall a man from the gods, excepting for his great good when

they happen to him, and for a medicinal effect. They say of Bion that,

infected with the atheism of Theodoras, he had long had religious men in

great scorn and contempt, but that death surprising him, he gave

himself up to the most extreme superstition; as if the gods withdrew and

returned according to the necessities of Bion. Plato and these examples

would conclude that we are brought to a belief of God either by reason

or by force. Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous,

difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how

arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to

be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly

to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have,

nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience. Yet

will they not fail to lift up their hands towards heaven if you give

them a good thrust with a sword in the breast, and when fear or sickness

has abated and dulled the licentious fury of this giddy humour they will

easily re-unite, and very discreetly suffer themselves to be reconciled

to the public faith and examples. A doctrine seriously digested is one

thing, and those superficial impressions another; which springing from

the disorder of an unhinged understanding, float at random and great

uncertainty in the fancy. Miserable and senseless men, who strive to be

worse than they can!

The error of paganism and the ignorance of our sacred truth, let this

great soul of Plato, but great only in human greatness, fall also into

this other mistake, “That children and old men were most susceptible of

religion,” as if it sprung and derived its credit from our weakness.

The knot that ought to bind the judgment and the will, that ought to

restrain the soul and join it to our creator, should be a knot that

derives its foldings and strength not from our considerations, from our

reasons and passions, but from a divine and supernatural constraint,

having but one form, one face, and one lustre, which is the authority

of God and his divine grace. Now the heart and soul being governed and

commanded by faith, ‘tis but reason that they should muster all our

other faculties, according as they are able to perform to the service

and assistance of their design. Neither is it to be imagined that all

this machine has not some marks imprinted upon it by the hand of the

mighty architect, and that there is not in the things of this world

some image that in some measure resembles the workman who has built and

formed them. He has, in his stupendous works, left the character of his

divinity, and ‘tis our own weakness only that hinders us from discerning

it. ‘Tis what he himself is pleased to tell us, “That he manifests his

invisible operations to us by those that are visible.” Sebond applied

himself to this laudable and noble study, and demonstrates to us that

there is not any part or member of the world that disclaims or derogates

from its maker. It were to do wrong to the divine goodness, did not the

universe consent to our belief. The heavens, the earth, the elements,

our bodies and our souls,--all things concur to this; we have but to

find out the way to use them; they instruct us, if we are capable

of instruction. For this world is a sacred temple, into which man is

introduced, there to contemplate statues, not the works of a mortal

hand, but such as the divine purpose has made the objects of sense; the

sun, the stars, the water, and the earth, to represent those that are

intelligible to us. “The invisible tilings of God,” says St. Paul,

“appear by the creation of the world, his eternal wisdom and divinity

being considered by his works.”

And God himself envies not men the grace

Of seeing and admiring heaven’s face;

But, rolling it about, he still anew

Presents its varied splendour to our view,

And on oar minds himself inculcates, so

That we th’ Almighty mover well may know:

Instructing us by seeing him the cause

Of ill, to revcreoce and obey his laws.”

Now our prayers and human discourses are but as sterile and undigested

matter. The grace of God is the form; ‘tis that which gives fashion and

value to it. As the virtuous actions of Socrates and Cato remain vain

and fruitless, for not having had the love and obedience to the true

creator of all things, so is it with our imaginations and discourses;

they have a kind of body, but it is an inform mass, without fashion and

without light, if faith and grace be not added thereto. Faith coming to

tinct and illustrate Sehond’s arguments renders them firm and stolid;

and to that degree that they are capable of serving for directions, and

of being the first guides to an elementary Christian to put him into the

way of this knowledge. They in some measure form him to, and render him

capable of, the grace of God, by which means he afterwards completes and

perfects himself in the true belief. I know a man of authority, bred up

to letters, who has confessed to me to have been brought back from the

errors of unbelief by Sebond’s arguments. And should they be stripped of

this ornament, and of the assistance and approbation of the faith,

and be looked upon as mere fancies only, to contend with those who are

precipitated into the dreadful and horrible darkness of irréligion, they

will even there find them as solid and firm as any others of the same

quality that can be opposed against them; so that we shall be ready to

say to our opponents:

Si melius quid habes, arcesse; vel imperium fer:

“If you have arguments more fit.

Produce them, or to these submit.”

let them admit the force of our reasons, or let them show us others,

and upon some other subject, better woven and of finer thread. I am,

unawares, half engaged in the second objection, to which I proposed to

make answer in the behalf of Sebond. Some say that his arguments are

weak, and unable to make good what he intends, and undertake with great

ease to confute them. These are to be a little more roughly handled, for

they are more dangerous and malicious than the first Men willingly wrest

the sayings of others to favour their own prejudicate opinions. To an

atheist all writings tend to atheisïm: he corrupts the most innocent

matter with his own venom. These have their judgments so prepossessed

that they cannot relish Sebond’s reasons. As to the rest, they think we

give them very fair play in putting them into the liberty of combatting

our religion with weapons merely human, whom, in her majesty, full of

authority and command, they durst not attack. The means that I shall

use, and that I think most proper to subdue this frenzy, is to crush and

spurn under foot pride and human arrogance; to make them sensible of

the inanity, vanity, and vileness of man; to wrest the wretched arms

of their reason out of their hands; to make them bow down and bite the

ground under the authority and reverence of the Divine Majesty. ‘Tis to

that alone that knowledge and wisdom appertain; that alone that can make

a true estimate of itself, and from which we purloin whatever we value

ourselves upon: [--Greek--] “God permits not any being but himself to be

truly wise.” Let us subdue this presumption, the first foundation of the

tyranny of the evil spirit _Deus superbis re-sistit, humilibus autem

dal gratiam._ “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

“Understanding is in the gods,” says Plato, “and not at all, or very

little, in men.” Now it is in the mean time a great consolation to a

Christian man to see our frail and mortal parts so fitly suited to our

holy and divine faith that, when we employ them to the subjects of their

own mortal and frail nature they are not even there more unitedly or

more firmly adjusted. Let us see, then, if man has in his power other

more forcible and convincing reasons than those of Sebond; that is to

say, if it be in him to arrive at any certainty by argument and reason.

For St. Augustin, disputing against these people, has good cause to

reproach them with injustice, “In that they maintain the part of our

belief to be false that our reason cannot establish.” And to show that

a great many things may be, and have been, of which our nature could

not sound the reason and causes, he proposes to them certain known and

undoubted experiments, wherein men confess they see nothing; and this he

does, as all other things, with a curious and ingenious inquisition.

We must do more than this, and make them know that, to convince the

weakness of their reason, there is no necessity of culling out uncommon

examples: and that it is so defective and so blind that there is no

faculty clear enough for it; that to it the easy and the hard are all

one; that all subjects equally, and nature in general, disclaim its

authority and reject its mediation.

What does truth mean when she preaches to us to fly worldly philosophy,

when she so often inculcates to us, “That our wisdom is but folly in the

sight of God: that the vainest of all vanities is man: that the man who

presumes upon his wisdom does not yet know what wisdom is; and that man,

who is nothing, if he thinks himself to be anything, does seduce and

deceive himself.” These sentences of the Holy Spirit do so clearly and

vividly express that which I would maintain that I should need no other

proof against men who would with all humility and obedience submit to

his authority: but these will be whipped at their own expense, and will

not suffer a man to oppose their reason but by itself.

Let us then, for once, consider a man alone, without foreign assistance,

armed only with his own proper arms, and unfurnished of the divine grace

and wisdom, which is all his honour, strength, and the foundation of his

being. Let us see how he stands in this fine equipage. Let him make me

understand, by the force of his reason, upon what foundations he has

built those great advantages he thinks he has over other creatures. Who

has made him believe that this admirable motion of the celestial arch,

the eternal light of those luminaries that roll so high over his head,

the wondrous and fearful motions of that infinite ocean, should be

established and continue so many ages for his service and convenience?

Can any thing be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and

wretched creature, who is not so much as master of himself, but subject

to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of

the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less

to command the whole? And the privilege which he attributes to himself

of being the only creature in this vast fabric who has the understanding

to discover the beauty and the paris of it; the only one who can

return thanks to the architect, and keep account of the revenues and

disbursements of the world; who, I wonder, sealed him this patent? Let

us see his commission for this great employment Was it granted in favour

of the wise only? Few people will be concerned in it. Are fools and

wicked persons worthy so extraordinary a favour, and, being the worst

part of the world, to be preferred before the rest? Shall we believe

this man?--“For whose sake shall we, therefore, conclude that the world

was made? For theirs who have the use of reason: these are gods and men,

than whom certainly nothing can be better:” we can never sufficiently

decry the impudence of this conjunction. But, wretched creature,

what has he in himself worthy of such an advantage? Considering the

incorruptible existence of the celestial bodies; beauty; magnitude, and

continual revolution by so exact a rule;

Cum suspicimus mæni cælestia mundi

Templa super, stellisque micantibus arthera fiium,

El venit in mcntem lunæ solisque viarurn.

“When we the heavenly arch above behold.

And the vast sky adorned with stars of gold.

And mark the r’eglar course? that the sun

And moon in their alternate progress run.”

considering the dominion and influence those bodies have, not only over

our lives and fortunes;

Facta etenim et vitas hominum suspendit ab aatris;

“Men’s lives and actions on the stars depend.”

but even over our inclinations, our thoughts and wills, which they

govern, incite and agitate at the mercy of their influences, as our

reason teaches us;

“Contemplating the stars he finds that they

Rule by a secret and a silent sway;

And that the enamell’d spheres which roll above

Do ever by alternate causes move.

And, studying these, he can also foresee,

By certain signs, the turns of destiny;”

seeing that not only a man, not only kings, but that monarchies,

empires, and all this lower world follow the influence of the celestial

motions,

“How great a change a little motion brings!

So great this kingdom is that governs kings:”

if our virtue, our vices, our knowledge, and this very discourse we are

upon of the power of the stars, and the comparison we are making betwixt

them and us, proceed, as our reason supposes, from their favour;

“One mad in love may cross the raging main,

To level lofty Ilium with the plain;

Another’s fate inclines him more by far

To study laws and statutes for the bar.

Sons kill their father, fathers kill their sons,

And one arm’d brother ‘gainst another runs..

This war’s not their’s, but fate’s, that spurs them on

To shed the blood which, shed, they must bemoan;

And I ascribe it to the will of fate

That on this theme I now expatiate:”

if we derive this little portion of reason we have from the bounty of

heaven, how is it possible that reason should ever make us equal to it?

How subject its essence and condition to our knowledge? Whatever we see

in those bodies astonishes us: _Quæ molitio, qua ferramenta, qui vectes,

quæ machina, qui ministri tanti operis fuerunt?_ “What contrivance, what

tools, what materials, what engines, were employed about so stupendous

a work?” Why do we deprive them of soul, of life, and discourse? Have we

discovered in them any immoveable or insensible stupidity, we who

have no commerce with them but by obedience? Shall we say that we have

discovered in no other creature but man the use of a reasonable soul?

What! have we seen any thing like the sun? Does he cease to be, because

we have seen nothing like him? And do his motions cease, because there

are no other like them? If what we have not seen is not, our knowledge

is marvellously contracted: _Quæ sunt tantæ animi angustiæ!_ “How narrow

are our understandings!” Are they not dreams of human vanity, to make

the moon a celestial earth? there to fancy mountains and vales, as

Anaxagoras did? there to fix habitations and human abodes, and plant

colonies for our convenience, as Plato and Plutarch have done? And of

our earth to make a luminous and resplendent star? “Amongst the

other inconveniences of mortality this is one, that darkness of the

understanding which leads men astray, not so much from a necessity of

erring, but from a love of error. The corruptible body stupifies

the soul, and the earthly habitation dulls the faculties of the

imagination.”

Presumption is our natural and original disease. The most wretched and

frail of all creatures is man, and withal the proudest. He feels and

sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and

rivetted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest

story of the house, the most remote from the heavenly arch, with animals

of the worst condition of the three; and yet in his imagination will be

placing himself above the circle of the moon, and bringing the heavens

under his feet. ‘Tis by the same vanity of imagination that he equals

himself to God, attributes to himself divine qualities, withdraws and

separates himself from the the crowd of other creatures, cuts out the

shares of the animals, his fellows and companions, and distributes to

them portions of faculties and force, as himself thinks fit How does

he know, by the strength of his understanding, the secret and internal

motions of animals?--from what comparison betwixt them and us does he

conclude the stupidity he attributes to them? When I play with my cat

who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me? We

mutually divert one another with our play. If I have my hour to begin

or to refusç, she also has hers. Plato, in his picture of the golden age

under Saturn, reckons, among the chief advantages that a man then had,

his communication with beasts, of whom, inquiring and informing himself,

he knew the true qualities and differences of them all, by which he

acquired a very perfect intelligence and prudence, and led his life

more happily than we could do. Need we a better proof to condemn human

impudence in the concern of beasts? This great author was of opinion

that nature, for the most part in the corporal form she gave them, had

only regard to the use of prognostics that were derived thence in his

time. The defect that hinders communication betwixt them and us, why may

it not be in our part as well as theirs? ‘Tis yet to determine where the

fault lies that we understand not one another,--for we understand them

no more than they do us; and by the same reason they may think us to be

beasts as we think them. ‘Tis no great wonder if we understand not them,

when we do not understand a Basque or a Troglodyte. And yet some have

boasted that they understood them, as Apollonius Tyanaus, Melampus,

Tiresias, Thales, and others. And seeing, as cusmographers report, that

there are nations that have a dog for their king, they must of necessity

be able to interpret his voice and motions. We must observe the parity

betwixt us, have some tolerable apprehension of their meaning, and so

have beasts of ours,--much about the same. They caress us, threaten us,

and beg of us, and we do the same to them.

As to the rest, we manifestly discover that they have a full and

absolute communication amongst themselves, and that they perfectly

understand one another, not only those of the same, but of divers kinds:

“The tamer herds, and wilder sort of brutes.

Though we of higher race conclude them mutes.

Yet utter dissonant and various notes,

From gentler lungs or more distended throats,

As fear, or grief, or anger, do them move,

Or as they do approach the joys of love.”

In one kind of barking of a dog the horse knows there is anger, of

another sort of bark he is not afraid. Even in the very beasts that

have no voice at all, we easily conclude, from the society of offices

we observe amongst them, some other sort of communication: their very

motions discover it:

“As infants who, for want of words, devise

Expressive motions with their hands and eyes.”

And why not, as well as our dumb people, dispute, argue, and tell

stories by signs? Of whom I have seen some, by practice, so clever and

active that way that, in fact, they wanted nothing of the perfection

of making themselves understood. Lovers are angry, reconciled, intreat,

thank, appoint, and, in short, speak all things by their eyes:

“Even silence in a lover

Love and passion can discover.”

What with the hands? We require, promise, call, dismiss, threaten, pray,

supplicate, deny, refuse, interrogate, admire, number, confess, repent,

fear, express confusion, doubt, instruct, command, incite, encourage,

swear, testify, accuse, condemn, absolve, abuse, despise, defy, provoke,

flatter, applaud, bless, submit, mock, reconcile, recommend, exalt,

entertain, congratulate, complain, grieve, despair, wonder, exclaim, and

what not! And all this with a variety and multiplication, even emulating

speech. With the head we invite, remand, confess, deny, give the lie,

welcome, honour, reverence, disdain, demand, rejoice, lament, reject,

caress, rebuke, submit, huff, encourage, threaten, assure, and inquire.

What with the eyebrows?--what with the shoulders! There is not a motion

that does not speak, and in an intelligible language without discipline,

and a public language that every one understands: whence it should

follow, the variety and use distinguished from others considered, that

these should rather be judged the property of human nature. I omit

what necessity particularly does suddenly suggest to those who are in

need;--the alphabets upon the fingers, grammars in gesture, and the

sciences which are only by them exercised and expressed; and the nations

that Pliny reports have no other language. An ambassador of the city of

Abdera, after a long conference with Agis, King of Sparta, demanded of

him, “Well, sir, what answer must I return to my fellow-citizens?” “That

I have given thee leave,” said he, “to say what thou wouldest, and as

much as thou wouldest, without ever speaking a word.” is not this a

silent speaking, and very easy to be understood?

As to the rest, what is there in us that we do not see in the operations

of animals? Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better

distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that

of bees? Can we imagine that such, and so regular, a distribution of

employments can be carried on without reasoning and deliberation?

“Hence to the bee some sages have assign’d

Some portion of the god and heavenly wind.”

The swallows that we see at the return of the spring, searching all the

corners of our houses for the most commodious places wherein to build

their nest; do they seek without judgment, and amongst a thousand choose

out the most proper for their purpose, without discretion? And in that

elegant and admirable contexture of their buildings, can birds rather

make choice of a square figure than a round, of an obtuse than of a

right angle, without knowing their properties and effects? Do they bring

water, and then clay, without knowing that the hardness of the latter

grows softer by being wetted? Do they mat their palace with moss or down

without foreseeing that their tender young will lie more safe and easy?

Do they secure themselves from the wet and rainy winds, and place their

lodgings against the east, without knowing the different qualities of

the winds, and considering that one is more wholesome than another?

Why does the spider make her web tighter in one place, and slacker in

another; why now make one sort of knot, and then another, if she has not

deliberation, thought, and conclusion? We sufficiently discover in most

of their works how much animals excel us, and how unable our art is to

imitate them. We see, nevertheless, in our rougher performances, that we

employ all our faculties, and apply the utmost power of our souls; why

do we not conclude the same of them?

Why should we attribute to I know not what natural and servile

inclination the works that excel all we can do by nature and art?

wherein, without being aware, we give them a mighty advantage over us

in making nature, with maternal gentleness and love, accompany and learn

them, as it were, by the hand to all the actions and commodities of

their life, whilst she leaves us to chance and fortune, and to seek out

by art the things that are necessary to our conservation, at the same

time denying us the means of being able, by any instruction or effort of

understanding, to arrive at the natural sufficiency of beasts; so that

their brutish stupidity surpasses, in all conveniences, all that our

divine intelligence can do. Really, at this rate, we might with great

reason call her an unjust stepmother: but it is nothing so, our polity

is not so irregular and unformed.

Nature has universally cared for all her creatures, and there is not

one she has not amply furnished with all means necessary for the

conservation of its being. For the common complaints I hear men make (as

the license of their opinions one while lifts them up above the clouds,

and then again depresses them to the antipodes), that we are the only

animal abandoned naked upon the bare earth, tied and bound, not having

wherewithal to arm and clothe us but by the spoil of others; whereas

nature has covered all other creatures either with shells, husks,

bark, hair, wool, prickles, leather, down, feathers, scales, or silk,

according to the necessities of their being; has armed them with talons,

teeth, or horns, wherewith to assault and defend, and has herself taught

them that which is most proper for them, to swim, to run, to fly, and

sing, whereas man neither knows how to walk, speak, eat, or do any thing

but weep, without teaching;

“Like to the wretched mariner, when toss’d

By raging seas upon the desert coast,

The tender babe lies naked on the earth,

Of all supports of life stript by his birth;

When nature first presents him to the day,

Freed from the cell wherein before he lay,

He fills the ambient air with doleful cries.

Foretelling thus life’s future miseries;

But beasts, both wild and tame, greater and less,

Do of themselves in strength and bulk increase;

They need no rattle, nor the broken chat,

Ay which the nurse first teaches boys to prate

They look not out for different robes to wear,

According to the seasons of the year;

And need no arms nor walls their goods to save,

Since earth and liberal nature ever have,

And will, in all abundance, still produce

All things whereof they can have need or use:”

these complaints are false; there is in the polity of the world a

greater equality and more uniform relation. Our skins are as sufficient

to defend us from the injuries of the weather as theirs are; witness

several nations that yet know not the use of clothes. Our ancient Gauls

were but slenderly clad, any more than the Irish, our neighbours, though

in so cold a climate; but we may better judge of this by ourselves: for

all those parts that we are pleased to expose to the air are found very

able to endure it: the face, the feet, the hands, the arms, the head,

according to the various habit; if there be a tender part about us,

and that would seem to be in danger from cold, it should be the stomach

where the digestion is; and yet our forefathers were there always

open, and our ladies, as tender and delicate as they are, go sometimes

half-bare as low as the navel. Neither is the binding or swathing of

infants any more necessary; and the Lacedæmoman mothers brought theirs

in all liberty of motion of members, without any ligature at all. Our

crying is common with the greatest part of other animals, and there are

but few creatures that are not observed to groan, and bemoan themselves

a long time after they come into the world; forasmuch as it is a

behaviour suitable to the weakness wherein they find themselves. As

to the custom of eating, it is in us, as in them, natural, and without

instruction;

“For every one soon finds his natural force.

Which he, or better may employ, or worse.”

Who doubts but an infant, arrived to the strength of feeding himself,

may make shift to find something to eat And the earth produces and

offers him wherewithal to supply his necessity, without other culture

and artifice; and if not at all times, no more does she do it to beasts,

witness the provision we see ants and other creatures hoard up against

the dead seasons of the year. The late discovered nations, so abundantly

furnished with natural meat and drink, without care, or without cookery,

may give us to understand that bread is not our only food, and that,

without tillage, our mother nature has provided us sufficiently of all

we stand in need of: nay, it appears more fully and plentifully than she

does at present, now that we have added our own industry:

“The earth did first spontaneously afford

Choice fruits and wines to furnish out the board;

With herbs and flow’rs unsown in verdant fields.

But scarce by art so good a harvest yields;

Though men and oxen mutually have strove,

With all their utmost force the soil t’ improve,”

the debauchery and irregularity of our appetites outstrips all the

inventions we can contrive to satisfy it.

As to arms, we have more natural ones than than most other animals more

various motions of limbs, and naturally and without lesson extract more

service from them. Those that are trained to fight naked are seen

to throw themselves into the like hazards that we do. If some beasts

surpass us in this advantage, we surpass many others. And the industry

of fortifying the body, and covering it by acquired means, we have by

instinct and natural precept? That it is so, the elephant shows

who sharpen, and whets the teeth he makes use of in war (for he has

particular ones for that service, which he spares, and never employs

them at all to any other use); when bulls go to fight, they toss and

throw the dust about them; boars whet their tusks; and the ichneumon,

when he is about to engage with the crocodile, fortifies his body,

and covers and crusts it all over with close-wrought and well-tempered

slime, as with a cuirass. Why shall we not say that it is also natural

for us to arm ourselves with wood and iron?

As to speech, it is certain that if it be not natural it is not

necessary. Nevertheless I believe that a child which had been brought up

in an absolute solitude, remote from all society of men (which would

be an experiment very hard to make), would have some kind of speech to

express his meaning by. And ‘tis not to be supposed that nature should

have denied that to us which she has given to several other animals:

for what is this faculty we observe in them, of complaining, rejoicing,

calling to one another for succour, and inviting each other to love,

which they do with the voice, other than speech? And why should they

not speak to one another? They speak to us, and we to them. In how many

several sorts of ways do we speak to our dogs, and they answer us?

We converse with them in another sort of language, and use other

appellations, than we do with birds, hogs, oxen, horses, and alter the

idiom according to the kind.

“Thus from one swarm of ants some sally out.

To spy another’s stock or mark its rout.”

Lactantius seems to attribute to beasts not only speech, but laughter

also. And the difference of language which is seen amongst us, according

to the difference of countries, is also observed in animals of the

same kind. Aristotle, in proof of this, instances the Various calls of

partridges, according to the situation of places:

“And various birds do from their warbling throats

At various times, utter quite different notes,

And some their hoarse songs with the seasons change.”

But it is yet to be known what language this child would speak; and of

that what is said by guess has no great appearance. If a man will allege

to me, in opposition to this opinion, that those who are naturally deaf

speak not, I answer that this is not only because they could not receive

the instruction of speaking by ear, but rather because the sense of

hearing, of which they are deprived, relates to that of speaking, and

that these hold together by a natural and inseparable tie, in such

manner that what we speak we must first speak to ourselves within, and

make it sound in our own ears, before we can utter it to others.

All this I have said to prove the resemblance there is in human things,

and to bring us back and join us to the crowd. We are neither above nor

below the rest All that is under heaven, says the sage, runs one law and

one fortune:

“All things remain

Bound and entangled in one fatal chain.”

There is, indeed, some difference,--there are several orders and

degrees; but it is under the aspect of one and the same nature:

“All things by their own rites proceed, and draw

Towards their ends, by nature’s certain law.”

Man must be compelled and restrained within the bounds of this polity.

Miserable creature! he is not in a condition really to step over the

rail. He is fettered and circumscribed, he is subjected to the same

necessity that the other creatures of his rank and order are, and of

a very mean condition, without any prerogative of true and real

pre-eminence. That which he attributes to himself, by vain fancy and

opinion, has neither body nor taste. And if it be so, that he only, of

all the animals, has this liberty of imagination and irregularity of

thoughts, representing to him that which is, that which is not, and that

he would have, the false and the true, ‘tis an advantage dearly bought,

and of which he has very little reason to be proud; for thence springs

the principal and original fountain of all the evils that befal

him,--sin, sickness, irresolution, affliction, despair. I say, then,

to return to my subject, that there is no appearance to induce a man to

believe that beasts should, by a natural and forced inclination, do the

same things that we do by our choice and industry. We ought from like

effects to conclude like faculties, and from greater effects greater

faculties; and consequently confess that the same reasoning, and the

same ways by which we operate, are common with them, or that they have

others that are better. Why should we imagine this natural constraint in

them, who experience no such effect in ourselves? added that it is more

honourable to be guided and obliged to act regularly by a natural and

inevitable condition, and nearer allied to the divinity, than to act

regularly by a temerarious and fortuitous liberty, and more safe to

entrust the reins of our conduct in the hands of nature than our

own. The vanity of our presumption makes us prefer rather to owe our

sufficiency to our own exertions than to her bounty, and to enrich the

other animals with natural goods, and abjure them in their favour,

in order to honour and ennoble ourselves with goods acquired, very

foolishly in my opinion; for I should as much value parts and virtues

naturally and purely my own as those I had begged and obtained from

education. It is not in our power to obtain a nobler reputation than to

be favoured of God and nature.

For instance, take the fox, the people of Thrace make use of when they

wish to pass over the ice of some frozen river, and turn him out before

them to that purpose; when we see him lay his ear upon the bank of

the river, down to the ice, to listen if from a more remote or nearer

distance he can hear the noise of the waters’ current, and, according as

he finds by that the ice to be of a less or greater thickness, to retire

or advance,--have we not reason to believe thence that the same rational

thoughts passed through his head that we should have upon the like

occasions; and that it is a ratiocination and consequence, drawn from

natural sense, that that which makes a noise runs, that which runs

is not frozen, what is not frozen is liquid, and that which is liquid

yields to impression! For to attribute this to a mere quickness of the

sense of hearing, without reason and consequence, is a chimæra that

cannot enter into the imagination. We are to suppose the same of

the many sorts of subtleties and inventions with which beasts secure

themselves from, and frustrate, the enterprizes we plot against them.

And if we will make an advantage even of this, that it is in our power

to seize them, to employ them in our service, and to use them at our

pleasure, ‘tis still but the same advantage we have over one another. We

have our slaves upon these terms: the Climacidæ, were they not women

in Syria who, squat on all fours, served for a ladder or footstool, by

which the ladies mounted their coaches? And the greatest part of free

persons surrender, for very trivial conveniences, their life and being

into the power of another. The wives and concubines of the Thracians

contended who should be chosen to be slain upon their husband’s tomb.

Have tyrants ever failed of finding men enough vowed to their devotion?

some of them moreover adding this necessity, of accompanying them in

death as well as life? Whole armies have bound themselves after this

manner to their captains. The form of the oath in the rude school of

gladiators was in these words: “We swear to suffer ourselves to be

chained, burnt, wounded, and killed with the sword, and to endure all

that true gladiators suffer from their master, religiously engaging both

body and soul in his service.”

Uire meum, si vis, flamma caput, et pete ferro

Corpus, et iutorto verbere terga seca.

“Wound me with steel, or burn my head with fire.

Or scourge my shoulders with well-twisted wire.”

This was an obligation indeed, and yet there, in one year, ten thousand

entered into it, to their destruction. When the Scythians interred their

king they strangled upon his body the most beloved of his concubines,

his cup-bearer, the master of his horse, his chamberlain, the usher of

his chamber, and his cook. And upon the anniversary thereof they killed

fifty horses, mounted by fifty pages, that they had impaled all up the

spine of the back to the throat, and there left them fixed in triumph

about his tomb. The men that serve us do it cheaper, and for a less

careful and favourable usage than what we treat our hawks, horses and

dogs withal. To what solicitude do we not submit for the conveniences of

these? I do not think that servants of the most abject condition would

willingly do that for their masters that princes think it an honour to

do for their beasts. Diogenes seeing his relations solicitous to redeem,

him from servitude: “They are fools,” said he; “‘tis he that keeps and

nourishes me that in reality serves me.” And they who entertain beasts

ought rather to be said to serve them, than to be served by them. And

withal in this these have something more generous in that one lion

never submitted to another lion, nor one horse to another, for want of

courage. As we go to the chase of beasts, so do tigers and lions to

the chase of men, and do the same execution upon one another; dogs upon

hares, pikes upon tench, swallows upon grass-hoppers, and sparrow-hawks

upon blackbirds and larks:

“The stork with snakes and lizards from the wood

And pathless wilds supports her callow brood,

While Jove’s own eagle, bird of noble blood,

Scours the wide country for undaunted food;

Sweeps the swift hare or swifter fawn away,

And feeds her nestlings with the generous prey.”

We divide the quarry, as well as the pains and labour of the chase, with

our hawks and hounds. And about Amphipolis, in Thrace, the hawkers and

wild falcons equally divide the prey in the half. As also along the lake

Mæotis, if the fisherman does not honestly leave the wolves an equal

share of what he has caught, they presently go and tear his nets in

pieces. And as we have a way of sporting that is carried on more by

subtlety than force, as springing hares, and angling with line and hook,

there is also the like amongst other animals. Aristotle says that the

cuttle-fish casts a gut out of her throat as long as a line, which she

extends and draws back at pleasure; and as she perceives some little

fish approach her she lets it nibble upon the end of this gut, lying

herself concealed in the sand or mud, and by little and little draws it

in, till the little fish is so near her that at one spring she may catch

it.

As to strength, there is no creature in the world exposed to so many

injuries as man. We need not a whale, elephant, or a crocodile, nor any

such-like animals, of which one alone is sufficient to dispatch a great

number of men, to do our business; lice are sufficient to vacate Sylla’s

dictatorship; and the heart and life of a great and triumphant emperor

is the breakfast of a little contemptible worm!

Why should we say that it is only for man, or knowledge built up by

art and meditation, to distinguish the things useful for his being, and

proper for the cure of his diseases, and those which are not; to know

the virtues of rhubarb and polypody. When we see the goats of Candia,

when wounded with an arrow, among a million of plants choose out

dittany for their cure; and the tortoise, when she has eaten a viper,

immediately go out to look for origanum to purge her; the dragon to rub

and clear his eyes with fennel; the storks to give themselves clysters

of sea-water; the elephants to draw not only out of their own bodies,

and those of their companions, but out of the bodies of their masters

too (witness the elephant of King Porus whom Alexander defeated), the

darts and javelins thrown at them in battle, and that so dexterously

that we ourselves could not do it with so little pain to the

patient;--why do we not say here also that this is knowledge and reason?

For to allege, to their disparagement, that ‘tis by the sole instruction

and dictate of nature that they know all this, is not to take from them

the dignity of knowledge and reason, but with greater force to attribute

it to them than to us, for the honour of so infallible a mistress.

Chrysippus, though in other things as scornful a judge of the condition

of animals as any other philosopher whatever, considering the motions of

a dog, who coming to a place where three ways met, either to hunt after

his master he has lost, or in pursuit of some game that flies before

him, goes snuffing first in one of the ways, and then in another, and,

after having made himself sure of two, without finding the trace of

what he seeks, dashes into the third without examination, is forced to

confess that this reasoning is in the dog: “I have traced my master to

this place; he must of necessity be gone one of these three ways; he is

not gone this way nor that, he must then infallibly be gone this other;”

and that assuring himself by this conclusion, he makes no use of his

nose in the third way, nor ever lays it to the ground, but suffers

himself to be carried on there bv the force of reason. This sally,

purely logical, and this use of propositions divided and conjoined, and

the right enumeration of parts, is it not every whit as good that the

dog knows all this of himself as well as from Trapezuntius?

Animals are not incapable, however, of being instructed after our

method. We teach blackbirds, ravens, pies, and parrots, to speak: and

the facility wherewith we see they lend us their voices, and render both

them and their breath so supple and pliant, to be formed and confined

within a certain number of letters and syllables, does evince that they

have a reason within, which renders them so docile and willing to learn.

Everybody, I believe, is glutted with the several sorts of tricks that

tumblers teach their dogs; the dances, where they do not miss any one

cadence of the sound they hear; the several various motions and leaps

they make them perform by the command of a word. But I observe this

effect with the greatest admiration, which nevertheless is very common,

in the dogs that lead the blind, both in the country and in cities: I

have taken notice how they stop at certain doors, where they are wont

to receive alms; how they avoid the encounter of coaches and carts, even

there where they have sufficient room to pass; I have seen them, by the

trench of a town, forsake a plain and even path and take a worse, only

to keep their masters further from the ditch;--how could a man have

made this dog understand that it was his office to look to his master’s

safely only, and to despise his own conveniency to serve him? And how

had he the knowledge that a way was wide enough for him that was not so

for a blind man? Can all this be apprehended without ratiocination!

I must not omit what Plutarch says he saw of a dog at Rome with the

Emperor Vespasian, the father, at the theatre of Marcellus. This dog

served a player, that played a farce of several parts and personages,

and had therein his part. He had, amongst other things, to counterfeit

himself for some time dead, by reason of a certain drug he was supposed

to eat After he had swallowed a piece of bread, which passed for the

drug, he began after awhile to tremble and stagger, as if he was taken

giddy: at last, stretching himself out stiff, as if dead, he suffered

himself to be drawn and dragged from place to place, as it was his part

to do; and afterward, when he knew it to be time, he began first gently

to stir, as if awaking out of a profound sleep, and lifting up his head

looked about him after such a manner as astonished all the spectators.

The oxen that served in the royal gardens of Susa, to water them, and

turn certain great wheels to draw water for that purpose, to which

buckets were fastened (such as there are many in Languedoc), being

ordered every one to draw a hundred turns a day, they were so accustomed

to this number that it was impossible by any force to make them draw one

turn more; but, their task being performed, they would suddenly stop and

stand still. We are almost men before we can count a hundred, and have

lately discovered nations that have no knowledge of numbers at all.

There is more understanding required in the teaching of’ others than in

being taught. Now, setting aside what Democritus held and proved, “That

most of the arts we have were taught us by other animals,” as by the

spider to weave and sew; by the swallow to build; by the swan and

nightingale music; and by several animals to make medicines:--Aristotle

is of opinion “That the nightingales teach their young ones to sing, and

spend a great deal of time and care in it;” whence it happens that those

we bring up in cages, and which have not had the time to learn of their

parents, want much of the grace of their singing: we may judge by this

that they improve by discipline and study; and, even amongst the wild,

it is not all and every one alike--every one has learnt to do better

or worse, according to their capacity. And so jealous are they one of

another, whilst learning, that they contention with emulation, and by

so vigorous a contention that sometimes the vanquished fall dead upon the

place, the breath rather failing than the voice. The younger ruminate

pensively and begin to mutter some broken notes; the disciple listens

to the master’s lesson, and gives the best account he is able; they

are silent oy turns; one may hear faults corrected and observe some

reprehensions of the teacher. “Ï have formerly seen,” says Arrian, “an

elephant having a cymbal hung at each leg, and another fastened to his

trunk, at the sound of which all the others danced round about him,

rising and bending at certain cadences, as they were guided by

the instrument; and ‘twas delightful to hear this harmony.” In the

spectacles of Rome there were ordinarily seen elephants taught to move

and dance to the sound of the voice, dances wherein were several changes

and cadences very hard to learn. And some have been known so intent upon

their lesson as privately to practice it by themselves, that they might

not be chidden nor beaten by their masters.

But this other story of the pie, of which we have Plutarch himself for a

warrant, is very strange. She lived in a barber’s shop at Rome, and did

wonders in imitating with her voice whatever she heard. It happened one

day that certain trumpeters stood a good while sounding before the

shop. After that, and all the next day, the pie was pensive, dumb, and

melancholic; which every body wondered at, and thought the noise of the

trumpets had so stupified and astonished her that her voice was

gone with her hearing. But they found at last that it was a profound

meditation and a retiring into herself, her thoughts exercising and

preparing her voice to imitate the sound of those trumpets, so that the

first voice she uttered was perfectly to imitate their strains, stops,

and changes; having by this new lesson quitted and taken in disdain all

she had learned before.

I will not omit this other example of a dog, also, which the same

Plutarch (I am sadly confounding all order, but I do not propose

arrangement here any more than elsewhere throughout my book) which

Plutarch says he saw on board a ship. This dog being puzzled how to get

the oil that was in the bottom of a jar, which he could not reach with

his tongue by reason of the narrow mouth of the vessel, went and fetched

stones and let them fall into the jar till he made the oil rise so high

that he could reach it. What is this but an effect of a very subtle

capacity! ‘Tis said that the ravens of Barbary do the same, when the

water they would drink is too low. This action is somewhat akin to what

Juba, a king of their nation relates of the elephants: “That when, by

the craft of the hunter, one of them is trapped in certain deep pits

prepared for them, and covered over with brush to deceive them, all the

rest, in great diligence, bring a great many stones and logs of wood to

raise the bottom so that he may get out.” But this animal, in

several other effects, comes so near to human capacity that, should I

particularly relate all that experience hath delivered to us, I should

easily have what I usually maintain granted: namely, that there is more

difference betwixt such and such a man than betwixt such a beast and

such a man. The keeper of an elephant in a private house of Syria robbed

him every meal of the half of his allowance. One day his master would

himself feed him, and poured the full measure of barley he had ordered

for his allowance into his manger which the elephant, casting an angry

look at the keeper, with his trunk separated the one-half from the

other, and thrust it aside, by that declaring the wrong was done him.

And another, having a keeper that mixed stones with his corn to make

up the measure, came to the pot where he was boiling meat for his own

dinner, and filled it with ashes. These are particular effects: but that

which all the world has seen, and all the world knows, that in all the

armies of the Levant one of the greatest force consisted in elephants,

with whom they did, without comparison, much greater execution than we

now do with our artillery; which takes, pretty nearly, their place in

a day of battle (as may easily be supposed by such as are well read in

ancient history);

“The sires of these huge animals were wont

The Carthaginian Hannibal to mount;

Our leaders also did these beasts bestride,

And mounted thus Pyrrhus his foes defied;

Nay, more, upon their backs they used to bear

Castles with armed cohorts to the war.”

They must necessarily have very confidently relied upon the fidelity and

understanding of these beasts when they entrusted them with the vanguard

of a battle, where the least stop they should have made, by reason of

the bulk and heaviness of their bodies, and the least fright that should

have made them face about upon their own people, had been enough to

spoil all: and there are but few examples where it has happened that

they have fallen foul upon their own troops, whereas we ourselves break

into our own battalions and rout one another. They had the charge not of

one simple movement only, but of many several things to be performed in

the battle: as the Spaniards did to their dogs in their new conquest of

the Indies, to whom they gave pay and allowed them a share in the spoil;

and those animals showed as much dexterity and judgment in pursuing the

victory and stopping the pursuit; in charging and retiring, as occasion

required; and in distinguishing their friends from their enemies, as

they did ardour and fierceness.

We more admire and value things that are unusual and strange than those

of ordinary observation. I had not else so long insisted upon these

examples: for I believe whoever shall strictly observe what we

ordinarily see in those animals we have amongst us may there find as

wonderful effects as those we seek in remote countries and ages. ‘Tis

one and the same nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has

sufficiently considered the present state of things, might certainly

conclude as to both the future ana the past. I have formerly seen men,

brought hither by sea from very distant countries, whose language not

being understood by us, and moreover their mien, countenance, and habit,

being quite differing from ours; which of us did not repute them savages

and brutes! Who did not attribute it to stupidity and want of common

sense to see them mute, ignorant of the French tongue, ignorant of our

salutations and cringes, our port and behaviour, from which all human

nature must by all means take its pattern and example. All that seems

strange to us, and that we do not understand, we condemn. The same

thing happens also in the judgments we make of beasts. They have several

conditions like to ours; from those we may, by comparison, draw some

conjecture: but by those qualities that are particular to themselves,

what know we what to make of them! The horses, dogs, oxen, sheep, birds,

and most of the animals that live amongst us, know our voices, and

suffer themselves to be governed by them: so did Crassus’s lamprey, and

came when he called it; as also do the eels that are found in the Lake

Arethusa; and I have seen several ponds where the fishes come to eat at

a certain call of those who use to feed them.

“They every one have names, and one and all

Straightway appear at their own master’s call:”

We may judge of that. We may also say that the elephants have some

participation of religion forasmuch as after several washings and

purifications they are observed to lift up their trunk like arms,

and, fixing their eyes towards the rising of the sun, continue long in

meditation and contemplation, at certain hours of the days, of their

own motion; without instruction or precept But because we do not see any

such signs in other animals, we cannot for that conclude that they are

without religion, nor make any judgment of what is concealed from us. As

we discern something in this action which the philosopher Cleanthes

took notice of, because it something resembles our own. He saw, he says,

“Ants go from their ant-hill, carrying the dead body of an ant towards

another ant-hill, whence several other ants came out to meet them, as if

to speak with them; where, after having been a while together, the last

returned to consult, you may suppose, with their fellow-citizens, and so

made two or three journeys, by reason of the difficulty of capitulation.

In the conclusion, the last comers brought the first a worm out of their

burrow, as it were for the ransom of the defunct, which the first laid

upon their backs and carried home, leaving the dead body to the others.”

This was the interpretation that Cleanthes gave of this transaction,

giving us by that to understand that those creatures that have no voice

are not, nevertheless, without intercourse and mutual communication,

whereof ‘tis through our own defect that we do not participate; and for

that reason foolishly take upon us to pass our censure. But they yet

produce either effects far beyond our capacity, to which we are so far

from being able to arrive by imitation that we cannot so much as by

imitation conceive it. Many are of opinion that in the great and last

naval engagement that Antony lost to Augustus, his admiral galley was

stayed in the middle of her course by the little fish the Latins call

_remora_, by reason of the property she has of staying all sorts of

vessels to which she fastens herself. And the Emperor Caligula, sailing

with a great navy upon the coast of Romania, his galley only was

suddenly stayed by the same fish, which, he caused to be taken, fastened

as it was to the keel of his ship, very angry that such a little animal

could resist both the sea, the wind, and the force of all his oars, by

being only fastened by the beak to his galley (for it is a shell-fish);

and was moreover, not without great reason, astonished that, being

brought to him in the vessel, it had no longer the strength it had

without. A citizen of Cyzicus formerly acquired the reputation of a good

mathematician for having learnt the quality of the hedge-hog: he has his

burrow open in divers places, and to several winds, and, foreseeing the

wind that is to come, stops the hole on that side, which that citizen

observing, gave the city certain predictions of the wind which was

presently to blow. The caméléon takes her colour from the place upon

which she is laid; but the polypus gives himself what colour he pleases,

according to occasion, either to conceal himself from what he fears, or

from what he has a design to seize: in the caméléon ‘tis a passive, but

in the polypus ‘tis an active, change. We have some changes of

colour, as in fear, anger, shame, and other passions, that alter our

complexions; but it is by the effect of suffering, as with the caméléon.

It is in the power of the jaundice, indeed, to make us turn yellow,

but ‘tis not in the power of our own will. Now these effects that we

discover in other animals, much greater than ours, seem to imply some

more excellent faculty in them unknown to us; as ‘tis to be presumed

there are several other qualities and abilities of theirs, of which no

appearances have arrived at us.

Amongst all the predictions of elder times, the most ancient and the

most certain were those taken from the flight of birds; we have nothing

certain like it, nor any thing to be so much admired. That rule and

order of the moving of the wing, whence they derived the consequences of

future things, must of necessity be guided by some excellent means to

so noble an operation: for to attribute this great effect to any natural

disposition, without the intelligence, consent, and meditation of him by

whom it is produced, is an opinion evidently false. That it is so, the

cramp-fish has this quality, not only to benumb all the members that

touch her, but even through the nets transmit a heavy dulness into the

hands of those that move and handle them; nay, it is further said that

if one pour water upon her, he will feel this numbness mount up the

water to the hand, and stupefy the feeling through the water. This is a

miraculous force; but ‘tis not useless to the cramp-fish; she knows it,

and makes use on’t; for, to catch the prey she desires, she will bury

herself in the mud, that other fishes swimming over her, struck and

benumbed with this coldness of hers, may fall into her power. Cranes,

swallows, and other birds of passage, by shifting their abode according

to the seasons, sufficiently manifest the knowledge they have of their

divining faculty, and put it in use. Huntsmen assure us that to cull out

from amongst a great many puppies that which ought to be preserved as

the best, the best way is to refer the choice to the mother; as thus,

take them and carry them out of the kennel, and the first she brings

back will certainly be the best; or if you make a show as if you would

environ the kennel with fire, that one she first catches up to save. By

which it appears they have a sort of prognostic which we have not; or

that they have some virtue in judging of their whelps other and more

certain than we have.

The manner of coming into the world, of engendering, nourishing, acting,

moving, living and dying of beasts, is so near to ours that whatever we

retrench from their moving causes, and add to our own condition above

theirs, can by no means proceed from any meditation of our own reason.

For the regimen of our health, physicians propose to us the example of

the beasts’ manners and way of living; for this saying (out of Plutarch)

has in all times been in the mouth of these people: “Keep warm thy feet

and head, as to the rest, live like a beast.”

The chief of all natural actions is generation; we have a certain

disposition of members which is the most proper for us to that end;

nevertheless, we are ordered by Lucretius to conform to the gesture and

posture of the brutes as the most effectual:--

More ferarum,

Quadrupedumque magis ritu, plerumque putantur

Concipere uxores:

Quia sic loca sumere possunt,

Pectoribus positis, sublatis semina lumbis;

and the same authority condemns, as hurtful, those indiscreet and

impudent motions which the women have added of their own invention, to

whom it proposes the more temperate and modest pattern and practice of

the beasts of their own sex:--

Nam mulier prohibet se concipere atque répugnât,

Clunibus ipsa viri Venerem si læta retractet,

Atque exossato ciet omni pectore fluctua.

Ejicit enim sulci recta regione viaque

Vomerem, atque locis avertit seminis ictum.

If it be justice to render to every one their due, the beasts that

serve, love, and defend their benefactors, and that pursue and fall upon

strangers and those who offend them, do in this represent a certain air

of our justice; as also in observing a very equitable equality in the

distribution of what they have to their young. And as to friendship,

they have it without comparison more lively and constant than men have.

King Lysimachus’s dog, Hyrcanus, master being dead, lay on his bed,

obstinately refusing either to eat or drink; and, the day that his

body was burnt, he took a run and leaped into the fire, where he was

consumed, As also did the dog of one Pyrrhus, for he would not stir from

off his master’s bed from the time he died; and when they carried him

away let himself be carried with him, and at last leaped into the pile

where they burnt his master’s body. There are inclinations of affection

which sometimes spring in us, without the consultation of reason; and by

a fortuitous temerity, which others call sympathy; of which beasts

are as capable as we. We see horses take such an acquaintance with

one another that we have much ado to make them eat or travel, when

separated; we observe them to fancy a particular colour in those of

their own kind, and, where they meet it, run to it with great joy and

demonstrations of good will, and have a dislike and hatred for some

other colour. Animals have choice, as well as we, in their amours, and

cull out their mistresses; neither are they exempt from our jealousies

and implacable malice.

Desires are either natural and necessary, as to eat and drink; or

natural and not necessary, as the coupling with females; or neither

natural nor necessary; of which last sort are almost all the desires of

men; they are all superfluous and artificial. For ‘tis marvellous how

little will satisfy nature, how little she has left us to desire; our

ragouts and kickshaws are not of her ordering. The Stoics say that a man

may live on an olive a day. The delicacy of our wines is no part of her

instruction, nor the refinements we introduce into the indulgence of our

amorous appetites:--

Neque ilia

Magno prognatum deposcit consule cunnum.

“Nature, in her pursuit of love, disclaims

The pride of titles, and the pomp of names.”

These irregular desires, that the ignorance of good and a false opinion

have infused into us, are so many that they almost exclude all the

natural; just as if there were so great a number of strangers in the

city as to thrust out the natural inhabitants, or, usurping upon their

ancient rights and privileges, should extinguish their authority and

introduce new laws and customs of their own. Animals are much more

regular than we, and keep themselves with greater moderation within the

limits nature has prescribed; but yet not so exactly that they have not

sometimes an analogy with our debauches. And as there have been furious

desires that have impelled men to the love of beasts, so there have been

examples of beasts that have fallen in love with us, and been seized

with monstrous affection betwixt kinds; witness the elephant who was

rival to Aristophanes the grammarian in the love of a young herb-wench

in the city of Alexandria, who was nothing behind him in all the offices

of a very passionate suitor; for going through the market where they

sold fruit, he would take some in his trunk and carry them to her.

He would as much as possible keep her always in his sight, and would

sometimes put his trunk under her handkerchief into her bosom, to feel

her breasts. They tell also of a dragon in love with a girl, and of a

goose enamoured of a child; of a ram that was suitor to the minstrelless

Glaucia, in the town of Asopus; and we see not unfrequently baboons

furiously in love with women. We see also certain male animals that

are fond of the males of their own kind. Oppian and others give us some

examples of the reverence that beasts have to their kindred in their

copulations; but experience often shows us the contrary:--

Nec habetur turpe juvencæ

Ferre patrem tergo; fit equo sua filia conjux;

Quasque creavit, init pecudes caper; ipsaque cujus

Semine concepta est, ex illo concipit ales.

“The heifer thinks it not a shame to take

Her lusty sire upon her willing back:

The horse his daughter leaps, goats scruple not

T’ increase the herd by those they have begot;

And birds of all sorts do in common live,

And by the seed they have conceived conceive.”

And for subtle cunning, can there be a more pregnant example than in the

philosopher Thales’s mule? who, fording a river, laden with salt, and

by accident stumbling there, so that the sacks he carried were all wet,

perceiving that by the melting of the salt his burden was something

lighter, he never failed, so oft as he came to any river, to lie down

with his load; till his master, discovering the knavery, ordered that he

should be laden with wood? wherein, finding himself mistaken, he ceased

to practise that device. There are several that very vividly represent

the true image of our avarice; for we see them infinitely solicitus to

get all they can, and hide it with that exceeding great care, though

they never make any use of it at all. As to thrift, they surpass us not

only in the foresight and laying up, and saving for the time to come,

but they have, moreover, a great deal of the science necessary thereto.

The ants bring abroad into the sun their grain and seed to air, refresh

and dry them when they perceive them to mould and grow musty, lest they

should decay and rot. But the caution and prevention they use in gnawing

their grains of wheat surpass all imagination of human prudence; for by

reason that the wheat does not always continue sound and dry, but grows

soft, thaws and dissolves as if it were steeped in milk, whilst hasting

to germination; for fear lest it should shoot and lose the nature and

property of a magazine for their subsistence, they nibble off the end by

which it should shoot and sprout.

As to what concerns war, which is the greatest and most magnificent of

human actions, I would very fain know whether we would use it for an

argument of some prerogative or, on contrary, for a testimony of our

weakness and imperfection; as, in truth, the science of undoing and

killing one another, and of ruining and destroying our own kind, has

nothing in it so tempting as to make it be coveted by beasts who have it

not.

Quando leoni Fortior eripuit vitam leo? quo nemore unquam

Expiravit aper majoris dentibus apri?

“No lion drinks a weaker lion’s gore,

No boar expires beneath a stronger boar.”

Yet are they not universally exempt; witness the furious encounters of

bees, and the enterprises of the princes of the contrary armies:--

Sæpe duobus Regibus incessit magno discordia motu;

Continuoque animos vulgi et trepidantia bello

Gorda licet longé præsciscere.

“But if contending factions arm the hive,

When rival kings in doubtful battle strive,

Tumultuous crowds the dread event prepare,

And palpitating hearts that beat to war.”

I never read this divine description but that, methinks, I there see

human folly and vanity represented in their true and lively colours. For

these warlike movements, that so ravish us with their astounding noise

and horror, this rattle of guns, drums, and cries,

Fulgur ibi ad coelum se tollit, totaque circum

Ære renidescit tellus, subterque virûm vi

Excitur pedibus sonitus, clamoreque montes

Icti rejectant voces ad sidera mundi;

“When burnish’d arms to heaven dart their rays,

And many a steely beam i’ th’ sunlight plays,

When trampled is the earth by horse and man,

Until the very centre groans again,

And that the rocks, struck by the various cries,

Reverberate the sound unto the skies;”

in the dreadful embattling of so many thousands of armed men, and so

great fury, ardour, and courage, ‘tis pleasant to consider by what idle

occasions they are excited, and by how light ones appeased:--

Paridis propter narratur amorem

Greciæ Barbariæ diro collisa duello:

“Of wanton Paris the illicit love

Did Greece and Troy to ten years’ warfare move:”

all Asia was ruined and destroyed for the lust of Paris; the envy of

one single man, a despite, a pleasure, a domestic jealousy, causes that

ought not to set two oyster-wenches by the ears, is the mover of all

this mighty bustle. Shall we believe those very men who are themselves

the principal authors of these mischiefs? Let us then hear the greatest,

the most powerful, the most victorious emperor that ever was, turning

into a jest, very pleasantly and ingeniously, several battles fought

both by sea and land, the blood and lives of five hundred thousand men

that followed his fortune, and the strength and riches of two parts of

the world drained for the expense of his expeditions:--

Quod futuit Glaphyran Antonius, hanc mihi poenam

Fulvia constituit, se quoqne uti futuam.

Fulviam ego ut futuam! quid, si me Manius oret

Podicem, faciam? Non puto, si sapiam.

Aut futue, aut pugnemus, ait

Quid, si mihi vitii

Charior est ipsâ mentula? Signa canant.

Qui? moi, que je serve Fulvie!

Sufflt-il quelle en ait envie?

A ce compte, on verrait se retirer von moi

Mille épouses mal satisfaites.

Aime-moi, me dit elle, ou combattons. Mais quoi?

Elle est bien laide! Allons, sonnes trompettes.

‘Cause Anthony is fired with Glaphire’s charms

Fain would his Fulvia tempt me to her arms.

If Anthony be false, what then? must I

Be slave to Fulvia’s lustful tyranny?

Then would a thousand wanton, waspish wives,

(I use my Latin with the liberty of conscience you are pleased to allow

me.) Now this great body, with so many fronts, and so many motions,

which seems to threaten heaven and earth:--

Quam multi Lybico volvuntur marmore fluctus,

Sævus ubi Orion hibemis conditur undis,

Vel quam solo novo densæ torrentur Aristæ,

Aut Hermi campo, aut Lyciæ flaventibus arvis;

Scuta sonant, pulsuque pedum tremit excita tellus:

“Not thicker billows beat the Lybian main,

When pale Orion sits in wintry rain;

Nor thicker harvests on rich Hermus rise,

Or Lycian fields, when Phobus burns the skies,

Than stand these troops: their bucklers ring around;

Their trampling turns the turf and shakes the solid ground:”

this furious monster, with so many heads and arms, is yet man--feeble,

calamitous, and miserable man! ‘Tis but an ant-hill disturbed and

provoked:--

It nigrum campis agmen:

“The black troop marches to the field:”

a contrary blast, the croaking of a flight of ravens, the stumble of

a horse, the casual passage of an eagle, a dream, a voice, a sign, a

morning mist, are any one of them sufficient to beat down and overturn

him. Dart but a sunbeam in his face, he is melted and vanished. Blow

but a little dust in his eyes, as our poet says of the bees, and all our

ensigns and legions, with the great Pompey himself at the head of them,

are routed and crushed to pieces; for it was he, as I take it, that

Sertorious beat in Spain with those fine arms, which also served Eumenes

against Antigonus, and Surena against Crassus:--

“Swarm to my bed like bees into their hives.

Declare for love, or war, she said; and frown’d:

No love I’ll grant: to arms bid trumpets sound.”

Hi motus animorum, atque hoc certamina tanta,

Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescent.

“Yet at thy will these dreadful conflicts cease,

Throw but a little dust and all is peace.”

Let us but slip our flies after them, and they will have the force and

courage to defeat them. Of fresh memory, the Portuguese having besieged

the city of Tamly, in the territory of Xiatine, the inhabitants of the

place brought a great many hives, of which are great plenty in that

place, upon the wall; and with fire drove the bees so furiously upon the

enemy that they gave over the enterprise, not being able to stand their

attacks and endure their stings; and so the citizens, by this new sort

of relief, gained liberty and the victory with so wonderful a fortune,

that at the return of their defenders from the battle they found they

had not lost so much as one. The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast

in the same mould; the weight and importance of the actions of princes

considered, we persuade ourselves that they must be produced by some as

weighty and important causes; but we are deceived; for they are pushed

on, and pulled back in their motions, by the same springs that we are

in our little undertakings. The same reason that makes us wrangle with

a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes; the same reason that makes us

whip a lackey, falling into the hands of a king makes him ruin a whole

province. They are as lightly moved as we, but they are able to do more.

In a gnat and an elephant the passion is the same.

As to fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man.

Our histories have recorded the violent pursuits that dogs have made

after the murderers of their masters. King Pyrrhus observing a dog that

watched a dead man’s body, and understanding that he had for three

days together performed that office, commanded that the body should be

buried, and took the dog along with him. One day, as he was at a general

muster of his army, this dog, seeing his master’s murderers, with great

barking and extreme signs of anger flew upon them, and by this first

accusation awakened the revenge of this murder, which was soon after

perfected by form of justice. As much was done by the dog of the wise

Hesiod, who convicted the sons of Ganictor of Naupactus of the murder

committed on the person of his master. Another dog being to guard a

temple at Athens, having spied a sacrilegious thief carrying away

the finest jewels, fell to barking at him with all his force, but the

warders not awaking at the noise, he followed him, and day being broke,

kept off at a little distance, without losing sight of him; if he

offered him any thing to eat he would not take it, but would wag his

tail at all the passengers he met, and took whatever they gave him; and

if the thief laid down to sleep, he likewise stayed upon the same place.

The news of this dog being come to the warders of the temple they put

themselves upon the pursuit, inquiring of the colour of the dog, and

at last found him in the city of Cromyon, and the thief also, whom they

brought back to Athens, where he got his reward; and the judges, in

consideration of this good office, ordered a certain measure of corn

for the dog’s daily sustenance, at the public charge, and the priests to

take care of it. Plutarch delivers this story for a certain truth, and

that it happened in the age wherein he lived.

As to gratitude (for I think we need bring this word into a little

repute), this one example, which Apion reports himself to have been an

eye-witness of, shall suffice.

“One day,” says he, “at Rome, they entertained the people with the sight

of the fighting of several strange beasts, and principally of lions

of an unusual size; there was one amongst the rest who, by his furious

deportment, by the strength and largeness of his limbs, and by his loud

and dreadful roaring, attracted the eyes of all the spectators. Amongst

other slaves that were presented to the people in this combat of beasts

there was one Androdus, of Dacia, belonging to a Roman lord of consular

dignity. This lion having seen him at a distance first made a sudden

stop, as it were in a wondering posture, and then softly approached

nearer in a gentle and peaceable manner, as if it were to enter into

acquaintance with him. This being done, and being now assured of what he

sought for, he began to wag his tail, as dogs do when they flatter their

masters, and to kiss and lick the hands and thighs of the poor wretch,

who was beside himself, and almost dead with fear. Androdus being by

this kindness of the lion a little come to himself, and having taken so

much heart as to consider and know him, it was a singular pleasure to

see the joy and caresses that passed betwixt them. At which the people

breaking into loud acclamations of joy, the emperor caused the slave

to be called, to know from him the cause of so strange an event; who

thereupon told him a new and a very strange story: “My master,” said

he, “being pro-consul in Africa, I was constrained, by his severity and

cruel usage, being daily beaten, to steal from him and run away; and,

to hide myself secretly from a person of so great authority in the

province, I thought it my best way to fly to the solitudes, sands, and

uninhabitable parts of that country, resolving that in case the means of

supporting life should chance to fail me, to make some shift or other

to kill myself. The sun being excessively hot at noon, and the heat

intolerable, I lit upon a private and almost inaccessible cave, and went

into it Soon after there came in to me this lion, with one foot wounded

and bloody, complaining and groaning with the pain he endured. At his

coming I was exceeding afraid; but he having spied me hid in the comer

of his den, came gently to me, holding out and showing me his wounded

foot, as if he demanded my assistance in his distress. I then drew out

a great splinter he had got there, and, growing a little more familiar

with him, squeezing the wound thrust out the matter, dirt, and gravel

which was got into it, and wiped and cleansed it the best I could. He,

finding himself something better, and much eased of his pain, laid him

down to rest, and presently fell asleep with his foot in my hand. From

that time forward he and I lived together in this cave three whole years

upon one and the same diet; for of the beasts that he killed in hunting

he always brought me the best pieces, which I roasted in the sun for

want of fire, and so ate it. At last, growing weary of this wild

and brutish life, the lion being one day gone abroad to hunt for our

ordinary provision, I departed thence, and the third day after was taken

by the soldiers, who brought me from Africa to this city to my master,

who presently condemned me to die, and to be thus exposed to the wild

beasts. Now, by what I see, this lion was also taken soon after, who has

now sought to recompense me for the benefit and cure that he received

at my hands.” This is the story that Androdus told the emperor, which he

also conveyed from hand to hand to the people; wherefore, at the general

request, he was absolved from his sentence and set at liberty, and the

lion was, by order of the people, presented to him. “We afterwards saw,”

says Apion, “Androdus leading this lion, in nothing but a small leash,

from tavern to tavern at Rome, and receiving what money every body would

give him, the lion being so gentle as to suffer himself to be covered

with the flowers that the people threw upon him, every one that met him

saying, ‘There goes the lion that entertained the man; there goes the

man that cured the lion.’”

We often lament the loss of beasts we love, and so do they the loss of

us:--

Post, bellator equus, positis insignibus, Æthon

It lacrymans, guttisque humectât grandibus ora.

“To close the pomp, Æthon, the steed of state.

Is led, the fun’ral of his lord to wait.

Stripped of his trappings, with a sullen pace

He walks, and the big tears run rolling down his face.”

As some nations have their wives in common, and some others have every

one his own, is not the same seen among beasts, and marriages better

kept than ours? As to the society and confederation they make

amongst themselves, to league together and to give one another mutual

assistance, is it not known that oxen, hogs, and other animals, at the

cry of any of their kind that we offend, all the herd run to his aid

and embody for his defence? The fish Scarus, when he has swallowed the

angler’s hook, his fellows all crowd about him and gnaw the line in

pieces; and if, by chance, one be got into the bow net, the others

present him their tails on the outside, which he holding fast with his

teeth, they after that manner disengage and draw him out.

Mullets, when one of their companions is engaged, cross the line over

their back, and, with a fin they have there, indented like a saw, cut

and saw it asunder. As to the particular offices that we receive from

one another for the service of life, there are several like examples

amongst them. ‘Tis said that the whale never moves that she has not

always before her a little fish like the sea-gudgeon, for this reason

called the guide-fish, whom the whale follows, suffering himself to be

led and turned with as great facility as the rudder guides the ship; in

recompense of which service also, whereas all the other things, whether

beast or vessel, that enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster’s

mouth, are immediately lost and swallowed up, this little fish retires

into it in great security, and there sleeps, during which time the whale

never stirs; but so soon as ever it goes out he immediately follows

it; and if by accident he loses the sight of his little guide, he goes

wandering here and there, and strikes his sides against the rocks like a

ship that has lost her helm; which Plutarch affirms to have seen in

the island of Anticyra. There is a like society betwixt the little bird

called the wren and the crocodile. The wren serves for a sentinel over

this great animal; and if the ichneumon, his mortal enemy, approach

to fight him, this little bird, for fear lest he should surprise him

asleep, both with his voice and bill rouses him and gives him notice

of his danger. He feeds of this monster’s leavings, who receives him

familiarly into his mouth, suffering him to peck in his jaws and betwixt

his teeth, and thence to pick out the bits of flesh that remain; and

when he has a mind to shut his mouth, he first gives the bird warning to

go out by closing it by little and little, and without bruising or doing

it any harm at all. The shell-fish called the naker, lives in the same

intelligence with the shrimp, a little sort of animal of the lobster

kind, which serves him in the nature of a porter, sitting at the opening

of the shell, which the naker keeps always gaping and open till the

shrimp sees some little fish, proper for their prey, within the hollow

of the shell, where she enters too, and pinches the naker so to the

quick that she is forced to close her shell, where they two together

devour the prey they have trapped in their fort. In the manner of living

of the tunnies we observe a singular knowledge of the three parts of

mathematics. As to astrology, they teach it men, for they stay in the

place where they are surprised by the brumal solstice, and never

stir thence till the next equinox; for which reason Aristotle himself

attributes to them this science. As to geometry and arithmetic, they

always form their numbers in the figure of a cube, every way square, and

make up the body of a battalion, solid, close, and environed round

with six equal sides, and swim in this square order, as large behind

as before; so that whoever in seeing them can count one rank may

easily number the whole troop, by reason that the depth is equal to the

breadth, and the breadth to the length.

As to magnanimity, it will be hard to exhibit a better instance of it

than in the example of the great dog sent to Alexander the Great from

the Indies. They first brought him a stag to encounter, next a boar, and

after that a bear, all which he slighted, and disdained to stir from

his place; but when he saw a lion he then immediately roused himself,

evidently manifesting that he declared that alone worthy to enter the

lists with him. Touching repentance and the acknowledgment of faults,

‘tis reported of an elephant that, having in the impetuosity of his rage

killed his keeper, he fell into so extreme a sorrow that he would never

after eat, but starved himself to death. And as to clemency, ‘tis said

of a tiger, the most cruel of all beasts, that a kid having been put

in to him, he suffered a two days’ hunger rather than hurt it, and the

third broke the grate he was shut up in, to seek elsewhere for prey; so

unwilling he was to fall upon the kid, his familiar and his guest, And

as to the laws of familiarity and agreement, formed by conversation,

it ordinarily happens that we bring up cats, dogs, and hares, tame

together.

But that which seamen by experience know, and particularly in the

Sicilian Sea, of the quality of the halcyons, surpasses all human

thought of what kind of animal has nature even so much honoured the

birth? The poets indeed say that one only island, Delos, which was

before a floating island, was fixed for the service of Latona’s

lying-in; but God has ordered that the whole ocean should be stayed,

made stable and smooth, without waves, without winds or rain, whilst

the halcyon produces her young, which is just about the solstice, the

shortest day of the year; so that by her privilege we have seven days

and seven nights in the very heart of winter wherein we may sail without

danger. Their females never have to do with any other male but their

own, whom they serve and assist all their lives, without ever forsaking

him. If he becomes weak and broken with age, they take him upon their

shoulders and carry him from place to place, and serve him till death.

But the most inquisitive into the secrets of nature could never yet

arrive at the knowledge of the wonderful fabric wherewith the halcyon

builds her nest for her little ones, nor guess at the materials.

Plutarch, who has seen and handled many of them, thinks it is the bones

of some fish which she joins and binds together, interlacing them, some

lengthwise and others across, and adding ribs and hoops in such manner

that she forms at last a round vessel fit to launch; which being done,

and the building finished, she carries it to the beach, where the sea

beating gently against it shows where she is to mend what is not well

jointed and knit, and where better to fortify the seams that are leaky,

that open at the beating of the waves; and, on the contrary, what is

well built and has had the due finishing, the beating of the waves does

so close and bind together that it is not to be broken or cracked by

blows either of stone or iron without very much ado. And that which is

more to be admired is the proportion and figure of the cavity within,

which is composed and proportioned after such a manner as not to receive

or admit any other thing than the bird that built it; for to any thing

else it is so impenetrable, close, and shut, nothing can enter, not so

much as the water of the sea. This is a very dear description of this

building, and borrowed from a very good hand; and yet me-thinks it does

not give us sufficient light into the difficulty of this architecture.

Now from what vanity can it proceed to despise and look down upon,

and disdainfully to interpret, effects that we can neither imitate nor

comprehend?

To pursue a little further this equality and correspondence betwixt us

and beasts, the privilege our soul so much glorifies herself upon, of

things she conceives to her own law, of striping all things that come

to her of their mortal and corporeal qualities, of ordering and

placing things she conceives worthy her taking notice of, stripping and

divesting them of their corruptible qualities, and making them to

lay aside length, breadth, depth, weight, colour, smell, roughness,

smoothness, hardness, softness, and all sensible accidents, as mean

and superfluous vestments, to accommodate them to her own immortal and

spiritual condition; as Rome and Paris, for example, that I have in

my fancy, Paris that I imagine, I imagine and comprehend it without

greatness and without place, without stone, without plaster, and without

wood; this very same privilege, I say, seems evidently to be in beasts;

for a courser accustomed to trumpets, to musket-shots, and battles, whom

we see start and tremble in his sleep and stretched upon his litter,

as if he were in a fight; it is almost certain that he conceives in

his soul the beat of a drum without noise, and an army without arms and

without body:--

Quippe videbis equos fortes, cum membra jacebunt

In somnis, sudare tamen, spirareque sæpe,

Et quasi de palmâ summas contendere vires:

“You shall see maneg’d horses in their sleep

Sweat, snort, start, tremble, and a clutter keep,

As if with all their force they striving were

The victor’s palm proudly away to bear:”

the hare, that a greyhound imagines in his sleep, after which we see

him pant so whilst he sleeps, stretch out his tail, shake his legs, and

perfectly represents all the motions of a course, is a hare without fur

and without bones:--

Venantumque canes in molli sæpe quiete

Jactant crura tamen subito, vocesque repente

Mittunt, et crebras reducunt naribus auras,

Ut vestigia si teneant inventa ferarum:

Expergefætique sequuntur inania sæpe

Cervorum simulacra, fagæ quasi dedita cernant;

Donee discussis redeant erroribus ad se: