4 INTRODUCTION. 



maintained, like Celsus, that they often put their reason to 

 a better use than did men, the Church upheld the contrary 

 view, going even as far as the famous, or at least notorious, 

 contention of the French philosopher, Descartes (1596 to 

 1650), which, as is well-known, takes away from animals 

 -all conscious feeling and emotion, and only regards them as 

 living machines, or as automata. Descartes, however, is 

 not the only holder of this opinion. He borrowed it from 

 a predecessor, the Spanish physician, Gomez Pereira, who 

 in his " Antoniana Margarita," published in the sixteenth 

 century, first maintained that animals had neither intellec- 

 tual feeling nor capacity of thought, and that, above all, 

 they had no minds, but were only machines controlled by 

 external circumstances. Descartes, whose whole philosophy 

 rests on the dualism of matter and spirit, admits nevertheless 

 that animals do many things better than men ; but they 

 therein follow, he asserts, only a blind instinct, or a 

 mechanical impulse communicated through their external 

 organs, just as a watch, an artificial machine, measures time 

 better than a man^ with all his intellect and reason. 

 According to Descartes, the feelings and emotions of animals 

 are an empty show ; a welcome piece of news for animal- 

 tormentors! " After the error of Atheism," says Descartes, 

 " there is none which leads weak minds further from the 

 path of virtue than the idea that the minds of animals re- 

 semble our own, and therefore that we have no greater right 

 to a future life than have gnats and ants, while, on the 

 contrary, our mind is quite independent of the body, and 

 does not therefore necessarily perish with it." 



This extreme opinion made a great success in its time, so 

 that no man could call himself a Cartesian without declaring 

 that animals were machines. 



Besides, the all-powerful devil of the Middle Ages got 

 mixed up in the matter, and was held to be the author of 

 the unmistakable manifestations of reason in animals, by 

 those who sought for some ground for them ; while, on the 

 contrary, others did not hesitate to impute this same author- 

 ship to the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth, through 

 the mediation of so-called instinct, which God had im- 

 planted in the minds of animals for their preservation and 

 increase a guiding and irresistible natural propensity, 

 inborn, unchangeable, independent of experience and 



