t not know more at the end of this time than it knew before your
lessons? Does the canary to which you teach a tune repeat it at once? do
you not spend a considerable time in teaching it? have you not seen that
it has made a mistake and that it corrects itself?

Is it because I speak to you, that you judge that I have feeling,
memory, ideas? Well, I do not speak to you; you see me going home
looking disconsolate, seeking a paper anxiously, opening the desk where
I remember having shut it, finding it, reading it joyfully. You judge
that I have experienced the feeling of distress and that of pleasure,
that I have memory and understanding.

Bring the same judgment to bear on this dog which has lost its master,
which has sought him on every road with sorrowful cries, which enters
the house agitated, uneasy, which goes down the stairs, up the stairs,
from room to room, which at last finds in his study the master it loves,
and which shows him its joy by its cries of delight, by its leaps, by
its caresses.

Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so
prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive in
order to show the mesenteric veins. You discover in it all the same
organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature
arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not
feel? has it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not suppose this
impertinent contradiction in nature.

But the schoolmasters ask what the soul of animals is? I do not
understand this question. A tree has the faculty of receiving in its
fibres its sap which circulates, of unfolding the buds of its leaves and
its fruit; will you ask what the soul of this tree is? it has received
these gifts; the animal has received those of feeling, of memory, of a
certain number of ideas. Who has bestowed these gifts? who has given
these faculties? He who has made the grass of the fields to grow, and
who makes the earth gravitate toward the sun.

"Animals' souls are substantial forms," said Aristotle, and after
Aristotle, the Arab school, and after the Arab school, the angelical
school, and after the angelical school, the Sorbonne, and after the
Sorbonne, nobody at all.

"Animals' souls are material," cry other philosophers. These have not
been in any better fortune than the others. In vain have they been asked
what a material soul is; they have to admit that it is matter which has
sensation: but