other is the faculty of preserving the impressions
caused by those objects, called Memory; and Memory is nothing more than
a continued, but weakened sensation.--Those faculties which I consider
as the productive causes of our thoughts, and which we have in common
with beasts, would produce but a very small number of ideas, if they
were not assisted by certain external organizations. If Nature, instead
of hands and flexible fingers, had terminated our wrist with the foot
of a horse, mankind would doubtless have been totally destitute of art,
habitation, and defence against other animals. Wholly employed in the
care of procuring food, and avoiding the beasts of prey, they would have
still continued wandering in the forests, like fugitive flocks. It is
therefore evident that, according to this supposition, the police would
never have been carried in any society to that degree of perfection, to
which it is now arrived. There is not a nation now existing, but, with
regard to the action of the mind, must not have continued very inferior
to certain savage nations, who have not two hundred different ideas,
nor two hundred words to express those ideas; and whose language must
consequently be reduced, like that of animals, to five or six different
sounds or cries, if we take from it the words bow, arrow, nets, etc.,
which suppose the use of hands. From whence I conclude, that, without a
certain exterior organization, sensibility and memory in us would prove
two sterile faculties. We ought to examine if these two faculties, by
the assistance of this organization, have in reality produced all our
thoughts. But; before we examine this subject, I may possibly be asked
whether these two faculties are modifications of a spiritual or a
material substance? This question, which has formerly been so often
debated by philosophers, and by some persons revived in our time, does
not necessarily fall within the limits of my work.---What I have to
offer, with regard to the Mind, is equally conformable to either of
these hypothesis. I shall therefore only observe that, if the church
had not fixed our belief in respect to this particular, and we had
been obliged by the light of reason alone to acquire a knowledge of
the thinking, principle, we must have granted, that neither opinion is
capable of demonstration; and consequently that, by weighing the reasons
on both sides, balancing the difficulties, and determining in favor of
the greater number of