_ANIMALS_


What a pitiful, what a sorry thing to have said that animals are
machines bereft of understanding and feeling, which perform their
operations always in the same way, which learn nothing, perfect nothing,
etc.!

What! that bird which makes its nest in a semi-circle when it is
attaching it to a wall, which builds it in a quarter circle when it is
in an angle, and in a circle upon a tree; that bird acts always in the
same way? That hunting-dog which you have disciplined for three months,
does it 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,