Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/181

Rh would not have been far from conceding thought to the higher animals. But then he would have had to concede it to all, even to the oyster and the sponge; and what have the oyster and the sponge that resembles a soul?

We know how this question occupied the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century, Frédéric Cuvier, Flourens, and others took it up, and tried to establish upon facts a distinction between intelligence and instinct. Finally, Darwin came and wiped out every line of demarkation between man and animals. But, whatever may be the favor—rapidly gained—that surrounds the doctrine of transformism, we must not forget, on the one hand, that it is not universally accepted, nor on the other hand, that it does not answer the question of the intelligence of animals.

The great physiologist Schwann, for instance, who died in 1882, maintained that there was an insurmountable barrier between us and those whom Michelet calls our inferior brethren. To him animals were alembics and electric batteries; mechanics, physics, and chemistry could account for all their manifestations. Man alone contained an immaterial principle, the freedom of which constitutes his characteristic appanage. That is what he distinctly declared on that day when the European great men of science came to Liége with an ovation to the illustrious creator of the cellular theory, on the fortieth anniversary of his professorship. "By virtue of the cellular theory," he said, "we now know that a vital force, fundamentally distinct from matter, exists neither in the organism as a whole nor in every cell. All the phenomena of animal and vegetable life can be explained by the properties of atoms, which are the forces of inert nature, or by other forces of the same atoms hitherto unknown. Freedom alone establishes a limit at which the explanation by forces of this kind must necessarily stop. It obliges us to admit only in man a principle that is incompatible with the properties of matter."

To Schwann, as to Malebranche, the animal was an automaton. It is true that he did not regard it as a mechanism moved by an internal or external spring; it was an aggregation of atoms combined in a certain manner. On the other hand and in this he was at variance with Descartes—it was not thought, but liberty which, in his eyes, constituted the distinctive attribute of man. But essentially, to him as to the pure Cartesians, man was an animal inhabited by a spiritual substance a substance distinct from matter. I learned, however, from conversations I had with him on the subject, that he did not deny to animals the faculty of feeling pleasure and pain, memory, intelligence, and a certain amount of reason. In this he wandered essentially from Cartesianism, for in it he accorded thought to matter.

From the exclusively logical point of view, Cartesianism is impregnable. Animals do not feel or reason, but have only the appearance of doing so. From the same point of view Schwann's system is