WHAT MAY ANIMALS BE TAUGHT? 169 



would not have been far from conceding thought to the higher ani- 

 mals. But then he would have had to concede it to all, even to the 

 oyster and the sponge ; and what have the oyster and the sponge that 

 resembles a soul ? 



We know how this question occupied the seventeenth and eight- 

 eenth centuries. In the nineteenth century, Frederic Cuvier, Flou- 

 rens, and others took it up, and tried to establish upon facts a distinc- 

 tion between intelligence and instinct. Finally, Darwin came and 

 wiped out every line of demarkation between man and animals. But, 

 whatever may be the favor rapidly gained that surrounds the doc- 

 trine of transformism, we must not forget, on the one hand, that it is 

 not universally accepted, nor on the other hand, that it does not an- 

 swer the question of the intelligence of animals. 



The great physiologist Schwann, for instance, who died in 1882, 

 maintained that there was an insurmountable barrier between us and 

 those whom Michelet calls our inferior brethren. To him animals 

 were alembics and electric batteries ; mechanics, physics, and chemis- 

 try could account for all their manifestations. Man alone contained 

 an immaterial principle, the freedom of which constitutes his charac- 

 teristic appanage. That is what he distinctly declared on that day 

 when the European great men of science came to Liege with an ova- 

 tion to the illustrious creator of the cellular theory, on the fortieth an- 

 niversary of his professorship. " By virtue of the cellular theory," he 

 said, " we now know that a vital force, fundamentally distinct from 

 matter, exists neither in the organism as a w r hole nor in every cell. 

 All the phenomena of animal and vegetable life can be explained by 

 the properties of atoms, which are the forces of inert nature, or by 

 other forces of the same atoms hitherto unknown. Freedom alone 

 establishes a limit at which the explanation by forces of this kind must 

 necessarily stop. It obliges us to admit only in man a principle that 

 is incompatible with the properties of matter." 



To Schwann, as to Malebranche, the animal was an automaton. 

 It is true that he did not regard it as a mechanism moved by an in- 

 ternal or external spring ; it was an aggregation of atoms combined in 

 a certain manner. On the other hand and in this he was at variance 

 with Descartes it was not thought, but liberty which, in his eyes, con- 

 stituted the distinctive attribute of man. But essentially, to him as 

 to the pure Cartesians, man was an animal inhabited by a spiritual 

 substance a substance distinct from matter. I learned, however, from 

 conversations I had with him on the subject, that he did not deny to 

 animals the faculty of feeling pleasure and pain, memory, intelligence, 

 and a certain amount of reason. In this he wandered essentially from 

 Cartesianism, for in it he accorded thought to matter. 



From the exclusively logical point of view, Cartesianism is im- 

 pregnable. Animals do not feel or reason, but have only the appear- 

 ance of doing so. From the same point of view Schwann's system is 



