e has a mind. He may complain
that it has not much of a mind, or he may marvel at its
intelligence--his attitude will depend upon the expectations which he
has been led to form. But regard the animal as he would regard a
bicycle or an automobile, he will not. The brute is not precisely like
us, but its actions bear an unmistakable analogy to our own; pleasure
and pain, hope and fear, desire and aversion, are so plainly to be read
into them that we feel that a man must be "high gravel blind" not to
see their significance.

Nevertheless, it has been possible for man, under the prepossession of
a mistaken philosophical theory, to assume the whole brute creation to
be without consciousness. When Descartes had learned something of the
mechanism of the human body, and had placed the human soul--_hospes
comesque corporis_--in the little pineal gland in the midst of the
brain, the conception in his mind was not unlike that which we have
when we picture to ourselves a locomotive engine with an engineer in
its cab. The man gives intelligent direction; but, under some
circumstances, the machine can do a good deal in the absence of the
man; if it is started, it can run of itself, and to do this, it must go
through a series of complicated motions.

Descartes knew that many of the actions performed by the human body are
not the result of conscious choice, and that some of them are in direct
contravention of the will's commands. The eye protects itself by
dropping its lid, when the hand is brought suddenly before it; the foot
jerks away from the heated object which it has accidentally touched.
The body was seen to be a mechanism relatively independent of the mind,
and one rather complete in itself. Joined with a soul, the circle of
its functions was conceived to be widened; but even without the
assistance of the soul, it was thought that it could keep itself busy,
and could do many things that the unreflective might be inclined to
attribute to the efficiency of the mind.

The bodies of the brutes Descartes regarded as mechanisms of the same
general nature as the human body. He was unwilling to allow a soul to
any creature below man, so nothing seemed left to him save to maintain
that the brutes are machines without consciousness, and that their
apparently purposive actions are to be classed with such human
movements as the sudden closing of the eye when it is threatened with
the hand. The melancholy results of this doctrin