Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/241

Rh breast without knowing what they do, and they do this in virtue of a very delicate and complex mechanism, the nature of which is known to few men.

Both of them have, after a time, ideas, memory, and will; the dog much earlier than the man.

If the animals were mere machines, it would be another argument for the position of those who believe that man also is a mere machine; but there are now none who do not admit that the animals have ideas, memory, and a measure of intelligence, and that they improve their knowledge; that a hunting-dog learns its work, an old fox is more astute than a young one, and so on.

Whence have they these faculties, if not from the primordial eternal cause, the principle of action, the great being that animates the whole of nature?

Man obtains the faculties of the animals much later than they, but in a higher degree; can he obtain them from any other source?

He has nothing but what the great being has given him. It would be a strange contradiction, a singular absurdity, if all the stars and elements, the animals and plants, obeyed, unceasingly and irresistibly, the laws of the great being, and man alone were independent of them.

Let us regard, with the eyes of reason, this animal man which the great being has produced.