of Mammiferous Animals. 317 



who has not onlj the faculty of willing, but who is moreover a 

 free being ; who is not confined to conform himself spontane- 

 ously to his situation by the blind influence which it exercises 

 over him, but who can know it, judge of it, appreciate its con- 

 sequences, and feel its restraints. And yet this liberty which 

 may make him contemplate his situation, shews him all that is 

 disagreeable in it ; he sees that he is chained, that he can make 

 no use of his liberty, that he must act without it, that he con- 

 sequently descends beneath himself, that he is degraded to the 

 level of the brute, that he has even fallen beneath that level ; 

 for the animal satisfying all the wants which it experiences, is 

 necessarily in harmony with nature, with the circumstances in 

 the midst of which he is placed, while the man who does not sa- 

 tisfy his, who is forced to renounce the most important of all, is 

 far from being in this state ; he is in the moral world what a mu- 

 tilated being or a monster is in the physical. 



Without doubt the liberty of man, which essentially re- 

 sides in his imagination, cannot be restrained, and in this 

 sense the man who is reduced to the necessity of performing 

 the office of a beast of burden is yet but a slave. But thought 

 which is not exercised soon ceases to be active ; and why should 

 the thought of a man be exercised who cannot conform his ac- 

 tions to it ? And if, notwithstanding his abject state, it pre- 

 serves some degree of activity, on what will it exercise itself? 

 The character and manners of the slaves of all ages may an- 

 swer. 



It would be impossible for us to ascend to the source of the 

 fundamental differences which exist between the domesticated 

 animal and the enslaved man, were not the difference of the re- 

 sources to which we are obliged to have recourse for subjecting 

 animals, and for subjecting man, sufficient to make us presume 

 that beings which are only to be mastered by entirely opposite 

 means no more resemble each other after than before submis- 

 sion, and that slavery and domesticity are widely different. 



In fact man can only be reduced to slavery and kept in it by 

 force, for it is part of the character of liberty to obey itself only. 

 The will, on the contrary, existing only in the wants and ma- 

 nifesting itself only by them, the animal can only be reduced 

 to domesticity by seduction, that is to say, only by acting upon 



