26 COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 



brought forward.* The idea of the intellectual gradation 

 from man to animals must have been necessarily offensive to 

 Christianity, which promised a future existence ; it was not so 

 for these Gentiles, who were much more occupied with matters 

 of the world. f 



The principles which we are endeavouring to revive are not, 

 however, completely those of Aristotle. In his treatise on the 

 soul he admits this gradation, but as presenting in each degree 

 a new manifestation beyond the manifestations existing in the 

 inferior degrees. The principle of the soul is unity ; but as 

 we reascend the series, from plants to man, it invests itself 

 with a greatly increased number of faculties. Porphyrius, re- 

 suming the ideas of the Stagyrite, seems to go even further, 

 and to approach nearer the truth; it is not faculties joined one 

 to another that he recognises in man and animals, but the 

 same in all, only more or less developed. J 



At the present day, if we have not returned to the ideas of 

 Pythagoras and the Stoics, at least w'e are very far from Pereira 

 and Descartes, with their animal machines, hydraulic-pneumatic 

 machines, as one of the partisans of the Bre'ton philosopher 

 (J. H. Crocius) calls them. 



* Sometimes this restraint is openly avowed ; and we see M. Maire, who 

 is also engaged upon the same questions, admit that, without these influences, 

 he would embrace the same ideas that we are endeavouring to bring forward. 

 " Let us frankly avow," he says, " if we had not continually before our minds 

 the doctrines of a religion which we respect, if we had not a sincere faith, 

 this intuitive belief which tells us we must make a mistake, we should dare 

 to write thus. The more the organisation of the animal is perfected, the 

 more the spiritual element produced by the action of the various functions 

 is itself perfected. . . . There would then be only a hierarchical gradation of 

 one and the same principle. The psychical fluid would be always the same 

 in all individuals. The difference in its manifestations would refer to the 

 difference in the organisations which produce them" (Sodttt Havraise d' Etudes 

 Diverses, p. 109, 1855-1856. 



f [We cannot exactly see why it must necessarily have been offensive to 

 Christianity. There is nothing injurious to religion in the theory of intel- 

 lectual gradation. EDITOR.] 



J Jam vero nobis ostendendum est earn (bestia) habere rationem internam 

 et intus conceptam. Videtur sane a nostra differre, non essentia sed gradu. 

 Uti nonnulli existimant Deorum a nostra discrepare rationem, non differ- 

 entia essentiali, sed quod illorum magis, nostra minus sit accurata. Et qui- 

 dem quod ad sensum attinet et reliquam, turn instrumentorum sensus, turn 

 carnis universae, conformationem attinet, earn eodem nobiscum modo se 

 habere in animalibus, ab omnibus fere conceditur. Porphyrius, transl. by 

 Holsteinius, De Abstinentia, 1655, p. 108. Is not unity of composition here 

 conjectured, both for the intellect and the body ? 



Disquisitio de Anima Brutorum, Bremae, 1676. 



