uld gladly quote at fuller length than my space will
allow. He dwells on the fact that the number, as well as the fecundity
of the insect races is greater than that of the mammalia, and even than
of plants; and he points out that "violent death is almost as necessary
an usage as is the law that we must all, in one way or another, die."
This leads him to the question whether animals can feel. "To speak
seriously," (au reel) he says (and why this, if he had always spoken
seriously?[91]), "can we doubt that those animals whose organization
resembles our own, feel the same sensations as we do? They must feel,
for they have senses, and they must feel more and more in proportion as
their senses are more active and more perfect." Those whose organ of any
sense is imperfect, have but imperfect perception in respect of that
sense; and those that are entirely without the organ want also all
corresponding sensation. "Movement is the necessary consequence of acts
of perception. I have already shown that in whatever manner a living
being is organized, if it has perceptions at all, it cannot fail to show
that it has them by some kind of movement of its body. Hence plants,
though highly organized, have no feeling, any more than have those
animals which, like plants, manifest no power of motion. Among animals
there are those which, like the sensitive plant, have but a certain
power of movement about their own parts, and which have no power of
locomotion; such animals have as yet but little perception. Those,
again, which have power of locomotion, but which, like automata, do but
a small number of things, and always after the same fashion, can have
only small powers of perception, and these limited to a small number of
objects. But in the case of man, what automata, indeed, have we not
here! How much do not education and the intercommunication of ideas
increase our powers and vivacity of perception. What difference can we
not see in this respect between civilized and uncivilized races, between
the peasant girl, and the woman of the world? And in like manner among
animals, those which live with us have their perceptions increased in
range, while those that are wild have but their natural instinct, which
is often more certain but always more limited in range than is the
intelligence of domesticated animals."[92]

. . . . . .

"For perception to exist in its fullest development in any animal body,
that body must form a whole--an _ens