S40 SOCIETY OF ANIMALS. 



r With regard to the advantages we derive from association, 

 a volume would not be sufficient to enumerate them. Man 

 possesses a portion of the reasoning faculty highly superior to 

 that of any other animal. He alone enjoys the power of com- 

 municating and expressing his ideas by articulate and artifi- 

 cial language. This inestimable prerogative is, perhaps, one 

 of the greatest secondary bonds of society, and the greatest 

 source of improvement to the human intellect. Without ar- 

 tificial language, though nature has bestowed on every ani- 

 mal a mode of expressing its wants and desires, its pleasures 

 and pains, what a humiliating figure would the human spe 

 cies exhibit, even upon the supposition that they did associ- 

 ate ! But when language and association are conjoined, the 

 human intellect, in the progress of time, arrives at 'a high de- 

 gree of perfection. *' Society gives rise to virtue, honor, gov- 

 ernment, subordination, arts, science, order, happiness. / All 

 the individuals of a community conduct themselves upon a 

 regulated system. Under the influence of established laws, 

 kings and magistrates, by the exercise of legal authority, en- 

 courage virtue, repress vice, and diffuse, through the extent 

 of their jurisdictions, the happy effects of their administra- 

 tion. In society, as in a fertile climate, human talents ger- 

 minate and are expanded ; the mechanical and liberal arts 

 flourish ; poets, orators, historians, philosophers, lawyers, 

 physicians, and theologians are produced. These truths are 

 pleasant ; and^it were to be wished that no evils accompanied 

 them. But, through the whole extent of nature, it would ap- 

 pear, from our limited views, that good and evil, pleasure and 

 pain, are necessary and perpetual concomitants." 



The advantages of society are immense and invaluable. 

 But the inconveniences, hardships, injustice, oppressions, and 

 cruelties, which too often originate from it, are great and 

 lamentable. Even under the mildest and best-regulated gov- 

 ernments, animosities, jealousies, avarice, fraud, and chicane, 

 are unfortunately never removed from our observation. In 

 absolute monarchies, and particularly in despotic govern 

 ments, the scenes of private and of general calamity arid 

 distress are often too dreadful to be described. Notwithstand- 

 ing all these disadvantages, however, any government is 

 preferable to anarchy ; and the comforts, pleasures, and im- 

 provements we receive from associating with each other, 

 overbalance all the evils to which society gives rise. 



From an attentive observation of the manners and economy 

 of animals, society has been distinguished into two kinds 



