Page:La Fontaine - The Original Fables Of, 1913.djvu/93

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XXX

THE TWO RATS, THE FOX, AND THE EGG[1]

(Book X.—No. 1)

Do not take it ill if, in these fables, I mingle a little of the bold, daring, and fine-spun philosophy that is called new.

They say that the lower animals are mere machines: that everything they do is prompted, not by choice, but by mechanism, coming about as it were by springs. There is, they say, neither feeling nor soul—nothing but a mechanical body. It goes just as a watch or clock goes, plodding on with even motion, blindly and aimlessly.

Open such a machine and examine it; what do we find? Wheels take the place of intelligence. The first wheel moves the second, and that in turn moves a third, with the result that, in due time, it strikes the hour.

According to these new philosophers, that is exactly the case with an animal. It receives a blow in a certain spot, this spot conveys the sensation to another spot, and so the message goes on from place to place

  1. At the time when this was written there was much discussion among the learned in France as to the powers of reasoning in animals.