sharing his open future with these mute comrades. Des
Cartes and Malebranche taught that animals are mere machines,
without souls, worked by God's arbitrary power. Swedenborg held
that "the souls of brutes are extinguished with their bodies." 19

18 Thomson's trans. of Bhagavad Gita, p. 77.

19 Outlines of the Infinite, chap. ii. sect. iv. 13.

Leibnitz, by his doctrine of eternal monads, sustains the
immortality of all creatures.

Coleridge defended the same idea. Agassiz, with much power and
beauty, advocates the thought that animals as well as men have a
future life. 20 The old traditions affirm that at least four
beasts have been translated to heaven; namely, the ass that spoke
to Balaam, the white foal that Christ rode into Jerusalem, the
steed Borak that bore Mohammed on his famous night journey, and
the dog that wakened the Seven Sleepers. To recognise, as Goethe
did, brothers in the green wood and in the teeming air, to
sympathize with all lower forms of life, and hope for them an open
range of limitless possibilities in the hospitable home of God, is
surely more becoming to a philosopher, a poet, or a Christian,
than that careless scorn which commonly excludes them from regard
and contemptuously leaves them to annihilation. This subject has
been genially treated by Richard Dean in his "Essay on the Future
Life of Brutes."

But on moral and psychological grounds the distinction is vast
between the dying man and the dying brute. Bretschneider, in a
beautiful sermon on this point, specifies four particulars. Man
foresees and provides for his death: the brute does not. Man dies
with unrecompensed merit and guilt: the brute does not. Man dies
with faculties and powers fitted for a more perfect state of
existence: the brute does not. Man dies with the expectation of
another life: the brute does not. Three contrasts may be added to
these. First, man desires to die amidst his fellows: the brute
creeps away by himself, to die in solitude. Secondly, man inters
his dead with burial rites, rears a memorial over them, cherishes
recollections of them which often change his subsequent character:
but who ever heard of a deer watching over an expiring comrade, a
deer funeral winding along the green glades of the forest? The
barrows of Norway, the mounds of Yucatan, the mummy pits of
Memphis, the rural cemeteries of our own day, speak the human
thoughts of sympathetic reverence and posthumous survival, typical
of so