Difficulties and Methods 15 



Descartes, on the other hand, writing some sixty years 

 later, takes, as is well known, the opposite ground. He 

 says in a letter to the Marquis of Newcastle, "As for the 

 understanding or thought attributed by Montaigne and 

 others to brutes, I cannot hold their opinion." While 

 animals surpass us in certain actions, it is, he holds, only 

 in those " which are not directed by thought. . . . They 

 act by force of nature and by springs, like a clock, which 

 tells better what the hour is than our judgment can inform 

 us. And doubtless when swallows come in the spring, 

 they act in that like clocks. All that honey bees do is 

 of the same nature" (183, pp. 281-283). The statement 

 of Descartes, contained in the letter to Mersenne of July 

 30, 1640, that animals are automata, is often misunder- 

 stood. Descartes does not assert that animals are uncon- 

 scious in the sense which that term would carry -to-day, 

 but only that they are without thought. Sensations, feel- 

 ings, passions, he is willing to ascribe to them, in so far as 

 these do not involve thought. "It must however be 

 observed that I speak of thought, not of life, nor of sensa- 

 tion," he says in the letter to Henry More, 1649; "I do 

 not refuse to them feeling ... in so far as it depends 

 only on the bodily organs" (183, p. 287). In this he does 

 not go so far as some modern writers, who decline to assert 

 the presence of any psychic process in the lower forms of 

 animal life. 



Turning to recent times, we find arguments very like 

 those of Montaigne used by the earlier evolutionary writers. 

 Darwin, for instance, says in "The Descent of Man," "As 

 dogs, cats, horses, and probably all the higher animals, even 

 birds, have vivid dreams, and this is shown by their move- 

 ments and the sounds uttered, we must admit that they pos- 

 sess some power of imagination" (169, p. 74). "Even 



