What a pity and what a poverty of spirit to assert that beasts are machines deprived of knowledge and sentiment, which effect all their operations in the same manner, which learn nothing, never improve, etc.

What! this bird, who makes its nest in a semicircle when he attaches it to a wall; and in a circle on a tree — this bird does all in the same blind manner! The hound, which you have disciplined for three months, does he not know more at the end of this time than he did before? Does the canary, to which you play an air, repeat it directly? Do you not employ a considerable time in teaching it? Have you not seen that he sometimes mistakes it, and that he corrects himself?

Is it because I speak to you that you judge I have sentiment, memory, and ideas? Well, suppose I do not speak to you; you see me enter my room with an afflicted air, I seek a paper with disquietude, I open the bureau in which I recollect to have shut it, I find it and read it with joy. You pronounce that I have felt the sentiment of affliction and of joy; that I have memory and knowledge.

Extend the same judgment to the dog who has lost his master, who has sought him everywhere with grievous cries, and who enters the house agitated and restless, goes upstairs and down, from room to room, and at last finds in the closet the master whom he loves, and testifies his joy by the gentleness of his cries, by his leaps and his caresses.

Some barbarians seize this dog, who so prodigiously excels man in friendship, they nail him to a table and dissect him living to show the mesenteric veins. You discover in him the same organs of sentiment which are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the springs of sentiment in this animal that he should not feel? Has he nerves, and is he incapable of suffering? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature.

But the masters of this school ask, what is the soul of beasts? I do not understand this question. A tree has the faculty of receiving in its fibres the sap which circulates, of evolving its buds, its leaves, and its fruits. You will ask me what is the soul of this tree? It has received these gifts. The animal has received those of sentiment, memory, and a certain number ............