Mammiferous Animals. 71 



idea that they obey us as absolute slaves, that the superiority 

 which we have over them is sufficient to constrain them to 

 renounce their natural love of independence, and to bend them 

 to our pleasure. The cause of our error is, that judging from 

 simple appearances, we have confounded two ideas essentially 

 distinct, domestication and slavery. Yet these two situations 

 have nothing in common; the distance between the domesti- 

 cated animal and the enslaved man is infinite. 



The animal in domesticity, from the moment that its will 

 conforms itself to the necessities which surround it, sacrifices 

 nolning of it; it lives in society without constraint on the part 

 of man, because without doubt it was a social animal, and it 

 has a chief to whose will it conforms itself within certain limits, 

 because, probably, it had a chief. There is nothing in this that 

 is not conformable to its propensities; it is satisfying its wants; 

 we do not see that it experiences others; and this is the very 

 state in which it would be, if in the most perfect liberty; only 

 its chief is a master who has an immense power over it, and 

 who often abuses that power ; but frequently also this master 

 employs his power to develope the natural qualities of the 

 animal, and in this respect Ihe animal is truly improved; it has 

 acquired a perfection which it could never have attained in 

 another state, under other influences. What a difference 

 between this animal and the enslaved man, who is not only a 

 social being, who has not only the faculty of willing, but who 

 is moreover a free being; who is not confined to conform him- 

 self spontaneously to his situation by the blind influence which 

 it exercises over him, but who can know it, judge of it, 

 appreciate its consequences, and feel its restraints. And yet 

 this liberty which may make him contemplate his situation, 

 shows 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 consequently 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, 

 white the man who does not satisfy 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 mutilated being or a 

 monster is in the physical. Thought which is not exercised 

 soon ceases to be active ; and why should the thought of a 

 man be exercised who cannot conform his actions to it? And 

 if, notwithstanding his abject state, it preserves some degree of 

 activity, on what will it exercise itself? The character and 

 manners of the slaves of all ages may answer. 



The difference of the resources to which wc are obliged to 



