the organs of
feeling so that they might not feel anything. Nobody had said that they
cry when they are wounded, and that they fly when pursued, without
experiencing pain or fear.

At that time people did not deny the omnipotence of God; He had been
able to communicate to the organized matter of animals pleasure, pain,
remembrance, the combination of a few ideas; He had been able to give to
several of them, such as the monkey, the elephant, the hunting-dog, the
talent of perfecting themselves in the arts which were taught to them;
not only had He been able to endow nearly all carnivorous animals with
the talent of warring better in their experienced old age than in their
too trustful youth; not only, I say, had He been able to do these
things, but He had done them: the universe bore witness thereto.

Pereira and Descartes maintained that the universe was mistaken, that
God was a juggler, that He had given animals all the instruments of life
and sensation, so that they might have neither life nor sensation,
properly speaking. But I do not know what so-called philosophers, in
order to answer Descartes' chimera, leaped into the opposite chimera;
they gave liberally of pure spirit to the toads and the insects.

Between these two madnesses, the one refusing feeling to the organs of
feeling, the other lodging a pure spirit in a bug, somebody thought of a
middle path. It was instinct. And what is instinct? Oh, oh, it is a
substantial form; it is a plastic form; it is I do not know what! it is
instinct. I shall be of your opinion so long as you will call the
majority of things, "I do not know what"; so long as your philosophy
begins and ends with "I do not know what", I shall quote Prior to you in
his poem on the vanity of the world.

The author of the article SOUL in the "Encyclopedia" explains
himself like this:--"I picture the animals' soul as an immaterial and
intelligent substance, but of what species? It must, it seems to me, be
an active principle which has sensations, and which has only that.... If
we reflect on the nature of the soul of animals, it supplies us with
groundwork which might lead us to think that its spirituality will save
it from annihilation."

I do not know how one pictures an immaterial substance. To picture
something is to make an image of it; and up till now nobody has been
able to paint the spirit. For the word "picture", I want the author to
understand "I conceive"; speaking for myself, I conf