14 The Animal Mind 



second book of Essays, " An Apology of Raymond Sebonde," 

 he gives free rein to the inclination to humanize them. I 

 quote Florio's translation: "The Swallowes which at the 

 approach of spring time we see to pry, to search and ferret 

 all the corners of our houses; is it without judgment they 

 seeke, or without discretion they chuse from out a thousand 

 places, that which is fittest for them, to build their nests and 

 lodging? . . . Would they (suppose you) first take water 

 and then clay, unlesse they guessed that the hardnesse of the 

 one is softned by the moistness of the other? . . . Why 

 doth the spider spin her artificiall web thicke in one place and 

 thin in another? And now useth one, and then another 

 knot, except she had an imaginary kind of deliberation, fore- 

 thought, and conclusion?" To ascribe such behavior to the 

 working of mere instinct, "with a kinde of unknowne, 

 naturall and servile inclination," is unreasonable. "The 

 Fox, which the inhabitants of Thrace use " to test the ice on a 

 river before crossing, which listens to the roaring of the water 

 underneath and so judges whether the ice is safe or not; 

 "might not we lawfully judge that the same discourse pos- 

 sesseth her head as in like case it would ours ? And that it is 

 a kinde of debating reason and consequence, drawne from 

 natural sense? 'Whatsoever maketh a noyse moveth, 

 whatsoever moveth, is not frozen, whatsoever is not frozen, 

 is liquid ; whatsoever is liquid, yeelds under any weight ? ' ' 



(277). 



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 under- 

 standing 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 



