No philosopher has been able
with his own strength to lift this veil stretched by nature over all the
first principles of things. Men argue, nature acts.
SECTION III
OF THE SOUL OF ANIMALS, AND OF SOME EMPTY IDEAS
Before the strange system which supposes animals to be pure machines
without any sensation, men had never thought that the beasts possessed
an immaterial soul; and nobody had pushed recklessness to the point of
saying that an oyster has a spiritual soul. Everyone concurred peaceably
in agreeing that the beasts had received from God feeling, memory,
ideas, and no pure spirit. Nobody had abused the gift of reason to the
point of saying that nature had given the beasts all the organs of
feeling so that they might not feel anything. Nobody had said that they
cry when they are wounded, and that they fly when pursued, without
experiencing pain or fear.
At that time people did not deny the omnipotence of God; He had been
able to communicate to the organized matter of animals pleasure, pain,
remembrance, the combination of a few ideas; He had been able to give to
several of them, such as the monkey, the elephant, the hunting-dog, the
talent of perfecting themselves in the arts which were taught to them;
not only had He been able to endow nearly all carnivorous animals with
the talent of warring better in their experienced old age than in their
too trustful youth; not only, I say, had He been able to do these
things, but He had done them: the universe bore witness thereto.
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