Page:La Fontaine - The Original Fables Of, 1913.djvu/93

 XXX

THE TWO RATS, THE FOX, AND THE EGG

( X.—No. 1)

not take it ill if, in these fables, I mingle a little of the bold, daring, and fine-spun philosophy that is called new.

They say that the lower animals are mere machines: that everything they do is prompted, not by choice, but by mechanism, coming about as it were by springs. There is, they say, neither feeling nor soul—nothing but a mechanical body. It goes just as a watch or clock goes, plodding on with even motion, blindly and aimlessly.

Open such a machine and examine it; what do we find? Wheels take the place of intelligence. The first wheel moves the second, and that in turn moves a third, with the result that, in due time, it strikes the hour.

According to these new philosophers, that is exactly the case with an animal. It receives a blow in a certain spot, this spot conveys the sensation to another spot, and so the message goes on from place to place