Self-control and how to secure it = (L'éducation de soi-même) / by Paul Dubois ; Authorized translation by Harry Hutcheson Boyd.

  • Paul Charles Dubois
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Self-control and how to secure it = (L'éducation de soi-même) / by Paul Dubois ; Authorized translation by Harry Hutcheson Boyd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    The animal thinks, loves, and suffers. I know all the distance that separates the men- tality of the brute from the spiritual life of man. The animal reacts more simply, obeys the impulses of his feelings, of his instincts; he lives according to nature and succeeds in that better than we do. It is only in man that we find conscience developed from what passes within him, the faculty of reacting, not on simple physiological excitations, but on mental representations. He alone is capable of analyzing, of inwardly observing, of rais- ing himself to the abstract idea; he alone obeys moral laws which he adopts when he has learned the advantages that virtue and happiness offer. To my way of thinking, if we wish to be spiritualistic, we must stretch this duality of body and spirit to the whole animal series, or at least to higher animals in which we see signs of the elements of logic, a certain rea- son, in which sentiments appear. However defective, it is a psychical life that we notice in them, and it is quite astonishing to see a dog think like a man, thought being precisely what we find irreducible. [325]