The human species / by A. de Quatrefages.

  • Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The human species / by A. de Quatrefages. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    35/550 (page 19)
    developed in certain animals, in man are evidently very- much reduced in comparison with the intelligence. The relative development of the latter certainly estab- lishes an enormous difference between man and animal. It is not, however, the intensity of a phenomenon which gives value to it from our present point of view, but simply its nature. The question is whether human intelli- gence and animal intelligence can be considered as of the same order. As a rule philosophers, psychologists, and theologians, have replied in the negative, and naturalists in the affirmative. This opposition can be easily understood. The former make the human mind, considered as an indivisible whole, their principal study, and attribute to it all our faculties. Unable to deny the similarity, external at least, between certain animal and human acts, and yet being anxious to clearly distinguish man from the brute, they have given to the acts different interpretations as they have been performed by one or the other. Naturalists have regarded the phenomena more closely without thinking of anything else, and when they have seen the animal behave in the same manner as they themselves would have done under the given circum- stances, they have concluded that the motives of the action must be fundamentally the same. I must ask permission to remain a naturalist, and to recaU some facts, and regard them from this point of view. The theologians themselves allow that the animal pos- sesses sensation, formation and association of images im- agination, and passion (R. P. de BonniotJ. They 'allow that the animal feels the relation of fitness or of unfitness between sensible objects and his own senses ; that it experi- ences sensible attractions and repulsions, and acts perfectly in consequence, and that in this sense the animal reasons amd judges (I'Abbd A. Lecomte). Therefore, they add we cannot doubt but that the animal possesses a priniiplo superior to that of mere matter, and we may even give it the name of mind (R. P. Bonniot). But in spite of all, c 2