_On the Souls of Beasts, and on Some Empty Ideas._
Before the strange system which supposes animals to be pure machines
without any sensation, men had never imagined an immaterial soul in
beasts; and no one had carried temerity so far as to say that an oyster
has a spiritual soul. All the world peaceably agreed that beasts had
received from God feeling, memory, ideas, but not a pure spirit. No one
had abused the gift of reason so far as to say that nature has given to
beasts the organs of feeling, in order that they may have no feeling. No
one had said that they cry out when wounded, and fly when pursued,
without experiencing either pain or fear.
God's omnipotence was not then denied: it was in His power to
communicate to the organized matter of animals pleasure, pain,
remembrance, the combination of some ideas; it was in His power to give
to several of them, as the ape, the elephant, the hound, the talent of
perfecting themselves in the arts which are taught them: not only was it
in His power to endow almost all carnivorous animals with the talent of
making war better in their experienced old age than in their confiding
youth; not only was it in His power to do this, but He had done it, as
the whole world could witness.
Pereira and Descartes maintained against the whole world that it was
mistaken; that God had played the conjurer; that He had given to animals
all the instruments of life and sensation, that they might have neither
sensation or life properly so called. But some pretended philosophers, I
know not whom, in order to answer Descartes' chimera, threw themselves
into the opposite chimera very liberally, giving "pure spirit" to toads
and insects. "_In vitium ducit culpæ fuga._"
Betwixt these two follies, the one depriving of feeling the organs of
feeling, the other lodging pure spirit in a bug--a mean was imagined,
viz., instinct. And what is "instinct"? Oh! it is a substantial form; it
is a plastic form; it is a--I know not what--it is instinct. I will be
of your opinion, so long as you apply to most things "I know not what";
so long as your philosophy shall begin and end with "I know not"; but
when you "affirm," I shall say to you with Prior, in his poem on the
vanity of the world:
Then vainly the philosopher avers
That reason guides our deeds, and instinct theirs.
How can we justly different causes frame,
When the effects entirely are the same?
Instinct and reason how can we divide?
'Tis the fool's ignorance, and the pedant's pride.
The author of the article on "Soul," in the "Encyclopædia," explains
himself thus: "I represent to myself the soul of beasts as a substance
immaterial and intelligent." But of what kind? It seems to me, that it
must be an active principle having sensations, and only sensations....
If we reflect on the nature of the souls of beasts, it does not of
itself give us any grounds for believing that their spirituality will
save them from annihilation.
I do not understand how you represent to yourself an immaterial
substance. To represent a thing to yourself is to make to yourself an
image of it; and hitherto no one has been able to paint the mind. I am
willing to suppose that by the word "represent," the author means I
"conceive"; for my part, I own that I do not conceive it. Still less do
I conceive how a spiritual soul is annihilated, because I have no
conception of creation or of nothing; because I never attended God's
council; because I know nothing at all of the principle of things.
If I seek to prove that the soul is a real being, I am stopped, and told
that it is a faculty. If I affirm that it is a faculty, and that I have
that of thinking, I am answered, that I mistake; that God, the eternal
master of all nature, does everything in me, directing all my actions,
and all my thoughts; that if I produced my thoughts, I should know
those which I should have the next minute; that I never know this; that
I am but an automaton with sensations and ideas, necessarily dependent,
and in the hands of the Supreme Being, infinitely more subject to Him
than clay is to the potter.
I acknowledge then my ignorance; I acknowledge that four thousand
volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what our soul is.
An orthodox philosopher said to a heterodox philosopher, "How can you
have brought yourself to imagine that the soul is of its nature mortal,
and that it is eternal only by the pure will of God?" "By my
experience," says the other. "How! have you been dead then?" "Yes, very
often: in my youth I had a fit of epilepsy; and I assure you, that I was
perfectly dead for several hours: I had no sensation, nor even any
recollection from the moment that I was seized. The same thing happens
to me now almost every night. I never feel precisely the moment when I
fall asleep, and my sleep is absolutely without dreams. I cannot
imagine, but by conjectures, how long I have slept. I am dead regularly
six hours in twenty-four, which is one-fourth of my life."
The orthodox then maintained against him that he always thought while he
was asleep, without his knowing of it. The heterodox replied: "I
believe, by revelation, that I shall think forever in the next world;
but I assure you, that I seldom think in this."
The orthodox was not mistaken in affirming the immortality of the soul,
since faith demonstrates that truth; but he might be mistaken in
affirming that a sleeping man constantly thinks.
Locke frankly owned that he did not always think while he was asleep.
Another philosopher has said: "Thought is peculiar to man, but it is not
his essence."
Let us leave every man at liberty to seek into himself and to lose
himself in his ideas. However, it is well to know that in 1750, a
philosopher underwent a very severe persecution, for having
acknowledged, with Locke, that his understanding was not exercised every
moment of the day and of the night, no more than his arms or his legs.
Not only was he persecuted by the ignorance of the court, but the
malicious ignorance of some pretended men of letters assailed the object
of persecution. That which in England had produced only some
philosophical disputes, produced in France the most disgraceful
atrocities: a Frenchman was made the victim of Locke.
There have always been among the refuse of our literature, some of those
wretches who have sold their pens and caballed against their very
benefactors. This remark is to be sure foreign to the article on "Soul":
but ought one to lose a single opportunity of striking terror into those
who render themselves unworthy of the name of literary men, who
prostitute the little wit and conscience they have to a vile interest,
to a chimerical policy, who betray their friends to flatter fools, who
prepare in secret the hemlock-draught with which powerful and wicked
ignorance would destroy useful citizens.
Did it ever occur in true Rome, that a Lucretius was denounced to the
consuls for having put the system of Epicurus into verse; a Cicero, for
having repeatedly written, that there is no pain after death; or that a
Pliny or a Varro was accused of having peculiar notions of the divinity?
The liberty of thinking was unlimited among the Romans. Those of harsh,
jealous, and narrow minds, who among us have endeavored to crush this
liberty--the parent of our knowledge, the mainspring of the
understanding--have made chimerical dangers their pretext; they have
forgotten that the Romans, who carried this liberty much further than we
do, were nevertheless our conquerors, our lawgivers; and that the
disputes of schools have no more to do with government than the tub of
Diogenes had with the victories of Alexander.
This lesson is worth quite as much as a lesson on the soul. We shall
perhaps have occasion more than once to recur to it.
In fine, while adoring God with all our soul, let us ever confess our
profound ignorance concerning that soul--that faculty of feeling and
thinking which we owe to His infinite goodness. Let us acknowledge that
our weak reasonings can neither take from nor add to revelation and
faith. Let us, in short, conclude that we ought to employ this
intelligence, whose nature is unknown, in perfecting the sciences which
are the object of the "Encyclopædia," as watchmakers make use of springs
in their watches, without knowing what _spring_ is.