10 THE. ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



animal nature, our bodies as machines. The human and the animal 

 world overlap at this point. Instead of saying with the Scholastics, 

 that the vegetative and sensitive souls are merged in the rational soul 

 as the higher form, Descartes regards the human body as an animal 

 organism united with a rational soul. Animals can then be regarded 

 as bodies only, and this is the point Descartes never wholly abandons. 

 If he goes so far as to suppose that some obscure sensations accompany 

 the operations of the body, it is because his idea of body develops 

 into the idea of an organism which acts as if it had psychic qualities. 



Fundamentally then we may regard this much disputed pro- 

 position, animals are automatic, i.e., self-contained machines, as 

 merely a forcible way of eliminating animism from physiology. But 

 apart from the mere statement of the view there is the question of its 

 historical place and significance. It is not a question of animal 

 psychology at all, for it is concerned neither with animals nor with 

 psychology, except in that wide sense in which the human being 

 can be called simply an animal. Even the disciples of Descartes 

 saw that the consequences were important and there can be no doubt 

 that Henry More hit the mark when he said that the whole idea arose 

 from the prejudice against giving animals a claim to immortality. 

 There can be no doubt, too, that this was not all. Descartes disliked 

 the sentimental attitude toward animals; he rightly thought the 

 popular ideas about their powers, were gross exaggerations; he lived 

 in close enough contact with the beliefs about human souls taking up 

 their abode in animal bodies to feel the immense advantage of a more 

 scientific view of the matter. Yet even here he blundered, for his 

 sharp distinction between soul and body made it more than ever 

 possible to regard the body as a place occupied by a soul, and so 

 reduced the possible objections against its dwelling in all and every 

 kind of body. Descartes in fact lost his way, believing as he did that 

 moral qualities belonged only to men and that no one could prove 

 animals to be reflective moral beings. Proofs might indeed be wanting 

 but statements were abundant. Apart from Pliny who counted 

 religion among the moral virtues of elephants and endorsed jhe 

 ancient idea that those animals lifted up their trunks in prayer, Lac- 

 tantius had been generous enough to ascribe morality, without 

 religion, to animals. Omitting Porphyry, whose influence had waned 

 many centuries before, and the queer stories which supplied the place 

 of earnest enquiry for the whole period of the middle ages, we find 

 Rorarius (1554) maintaining that animals have reason and make a 

 better use of it than man. In the same year Gomez Pereira, in a book 

 called Antoniana Margarita, upheld a similar position, the source of 



