2*2 INTRODUCTION. 



the impressions of pleasure or pain that belong to them, constitutes 

 imagination. 



One privileged being, MAN, has the faculty of associating his general 

 ideas with particular images more or less arbitrary, easily impressed 

 upon the memory, and which serve to recal the general ideas they 

 represent. These associated images are styled signs ; their assemblage 

 is a language. When the language is composed of images that relate 

 to the sense of hearing or of sounds, it is termed speech ; and when 

 relative to that of sight, hieroglyphics. Writing is a series of images 

 that relate to the sense of sight, by which we represent the elementary 

 sounds, and, by combining them, all the images relative to the sense of 

 hearing of which speech is composed; it is therefore only a mediate 

 representation of ideas. 



Although, with respect to the intellectual faculties, the most jxjrfect 

 animals are infinitely beneath man ; it is certain that their intelligence 

 performs operations of the same kind. They move in consequence 

 of sensations received, are susceptible of durable affections, and acquire 

 by experience a certain knowledge of things, by which they are 

 governed independently of actual pain or pleasure, and by the simple 

 foresight of consequences. When domesticated, they feel their subor- 

 dination, know that the being who punishes them may refrain from so 

 doing if he will ; and when sensible of having done wrong, or seeing 

 him angry, they assume a suppliant and deprecating air. In the 

 society of Man they become either corrupted or improved, and are 

 susceptible of emulation and jealousy : they have among themselves a 

 natural language, which, it is true, is merely the expression of their 

 momentary sensations, but Man teaches them to understand another, 

 much more complicated, by which he makes known to them his will, 

 and causes them to execute it. 



To sum up all, we perceive in the higher animals a certain degree 

 of reason, with all its consequences, good and bad, and Avhich appears 

 to be about the same as that of children ere they have learned to speak. 

 The lower we descend from Man the weaker these faculties become, 

 and at the bottom of the scale we find them reduced to signs (at times 

 equivocal) of sensibility, that is, to some few slight movements to escape 

 from pain. Between these two extremes, the degrees are infinite. 



In a great number of animals, however, there exists another kind of 

 intelligence, called instinct. This induces them to certain actions 

 necessary to the preservation of the species, but very often altogether 

 foreign to the apparent wants of the individual ; often also very compli- 

 cated, and which, if attributed to intelligence, would suppose a fore- 



