regards man AS THE
CHIEF OF ITS FLOCK.... Man is regarded by domestic animals as a member
of their society. All that he has to do is to get himself accepted by
them as an associate: he soon becomes their chief, in consequence of his
superior intelligence. He does not, then, change the NATURAL CONDITION
of these animals, as Buffon has said. On the contrary, he uses this
natural condition to his own advantage; in other words, he finds
SOCIABLE animals, and renders them DOMESTIC by becoming their associate
and chief. Thus, the DOMESTICITY of animals is only a special condition,
a simple modification, a definitive consequence of their SOCIABILITY.
All domestic animals are by nature sociable animals."...--Flourens:
Summary of the Observations of F. Cuvier.

Sociable animals follow their chief by INSTINCT; but take notice of the
fact (which F. Cuvier omitted to state), that the function of the chief
is altogether one of INTELLIGENCE. The chief does not teach the others
to associate, to unite under his lead, to reproduce their kind, to
take to flight, or to defend themselves. Concerning each of these
particulars, his subordinates are as well informed as he. But it is the
chief who, by his accumulated experience, provides against accidents; he
it is whose private intelligence supplements, in difficult situations,
the general instinct; he it is who deliberates, decides, and leads; he
it is, in short, whose enlightened prudence regulates the public routine
for the greatest good of all.

Man (naturally a sociable being) naturally follows a chief. Originally,
the chief is the father, the patriarch, the elder; in other words, the
good and wise man, whose functions, consequently, are exclusively of a
reflective and intellectual nature. The human race--like all other
races of sociable animals--has its instincts, its innate faculties, its
general ideas, and its categories of sentiment and reason. Its chiefs,
legislators, or kings have devised nothing, supposed nothing, imagined
nothing. They have only guided society by their accumulated experience,
always however in conformity with opinions and beliefs.

Those philosophers who (carrying into morals and into history their
gloomy and factious whims) affirm that the human race had originally
neither chiefs nor kings, know nothing of the nature of man. Royalty,
and absolute royalty, is--as truly and more truly than democracy--a
primitive form of government. Perceiving that, in the rem