The Complete Essays (79 page)

[B]
variaeque volucres
Longe alias alio jaciunt in tempore voces,
Et partim mutant cum tempestatibus una
Raucisonos cantus
.

[At different times some birds utter highly different sounds, some even making their songs more raucous with changes in the weather.]

[A] But we do not know what language an isolated child would actually speak and the guesses made about it all seem improbable.
⁶⁶

If anyone challenges my opinion, citing the fact that people who are born deaf never learn to talk at all, I have an answer to that: it is not simply because they are unable to receive instruction in speech through the ear but rather because of the intimate relationship which exists between the faculty of hearing (the power they are deprived of) and the faculty of speech, which are by their nature closely sutured together. Whenever we talk, we must first talk as it were to ourselves: our speech first sounds in our own ears, then we utter it into the ears of other people.

I have gone into all this to emphasize similarities with things human, so bringing Man into conformity with the majority of creatures. We are neither above them nor below them. ‘Everything under the Sky’, said the Wise Man, ‘runs according to like laws and fortune.’
⁶⁷

[B]
Indupedita suis fatalibus omnia vinclis
.

[All things are enchained in the fetters of their destiny.]

[A] Some difference there is: there are orders and degrees: but always beneath the countenance of Nature who is one and the same.

[B]
res quaeque suo ritu procedit, et omnes
Foedere naturae certo discrimina servant
.

[Each thing proceeds after its own manner, and all things maintain their distinctive qualities by the fixed compact of Nature.]
⁶⁸

[A] Man must be restrained, with his own rank, within the boundary walls of this polity: the wretch has no stomach for effectively clambering over them; he is trussed up and bound, subject to the same restraints as the other creatures of his natural order. His condition is a very modest one. As for his essential being, he has no true privilege or pre-eminence: what he thinks or fancies he has, has no savour, no body to it. Granted that, of all the animals, Man alone has freedom to think and such unruly ways of doing so that he can imagine things which are and things which are not, imagine his wishes, or the false and the true! but he has to pay a high price for this advantage – and he has little cause to boast about it, since it is the chief source of the woes which beset him: sin, sickness, irresolution, confusion and despair.

To get back to the subject, there is, I say, no rational likelihood that beasts are forced to do by natural inclination the selfsame things which we do by choice and ingenuity. From similar effects we should conclude that there are similar faculties. Consequently, we should admit that animals employ the same method and the same reasoning as ourselves when we do anything.
⁶⁹
Why should we think that they have inner natural instincts different from anything we experience in ourselves? Added to which, it is more honourable that we be guided towards regular, obligatory behaviour by the natural and ineluctable properties of our being: that is more God-like than rash and fortuitous freedom; it is safer to leave the driver’s reins in Nature’s hands, not ours. Our empty arrogance makes us prefer to owe our adequacies to our selves rather than to the bounty of Nature; we prefer to lavish the natural goods on other animals, giving them up so as to flatter and honour ourselves with acquired properties. We do that, it seems to me, out of some simple-minded humour. Personally I value graces which are mine since I was born with them more than those which I have had to beg and borrow as an apprentice. It is not within our power to acquire a higher recommendation than to be favoured by God and Nature.

Consider the fox which Thracians employ when they want to cross the ice of a frozen river; with this end in view they let it loose. Were we to see it stopping at the river’s edge, bringing its ear close to the ice to judge from the noise how near to the surface the current is running; darting forward or pulling back according to its estimate of the thickness or thinness of the ice, would it not be right to conclude that the same reasoning passes through its head as would pass through ours and that it ratiocinates and draws consequences by its natural intelligence like this: ‘That which makes a noise is moving; that which moves is not frozen; that which is not frozen is liquid; that which is liquid bends under weight’? Attributing all that exclusively to its keen sense of hearing, without any reasoning or drawing of consequences on the part of the fox, is unthinkable, a chimera. The same judgement should apply to all the ingenious ruses by which beasts protect themselves from our schemes against them.

Should we pride ourself on our ability to capture them and make them work for us? But that is no more than the advantage we have over each other: our slaves are in the same condition. [B] Were not the
Climacides
Syrian slave-women who went down on all fours to serve as steps or ladders for the ladies to climb up into their coaches? [A] Even the majority of free men and women, for very slight advantages, place themselves in the power of others. [C] Thracian wives and concubines beg to be selected for slaughter over the dead husband’s tomb. [A] Have tyrants ever failed to find men sworn and devoted to them – even though some require them to follow them in death as in life? [B] Whole armies have been bound to their captains that way.

The form of oath used in that rough school which trained gladiators to fight to the finish included the vows: ‘We swear to let ourselves be fettered, burned, beaten or killed by the sword, suffering all that true gladiators suffer at the hands of their Master’; they most scrupulously bound themselves, body and soul, to his service:

Ure meum, si vis, flamma caput, et pete ferro
Corpus, et intorto verbere terga seca
.

[Burn my head, if you will, with fire, plunge your iron sword through my body or lash my back with your twisted thongs.]

It was a real, binding undertaking. And yet, one year, ten thousand men were found to enter that school and perish there.

[C] When the Scythians buried their king, over his body they strangled his favourite concubine, his cup-bearer, his ostler, his chamberlain, the guard to his bedchamber and his cook. And on the anniversary of his death
they would take fifty pages mounted on fifty horses and kill them, impaling them from behind, from spine to throat, and leaving them dead on parade about his tomb.
⁷⁰

[A] The men who serve us do so more cheaply than our falcons, our horses or our hounds; and they are less carefully looked after – [C] what menial tasks will we not bow to for the convenience of those animals! The most abject slaves, it seems to me, will not willingly do for their masters what princes are proud to do for such creatures. When Diogenes saw his parents striving to purchase his freedom he exclaimed: ‘They must be fools: my Master looks after me and feeds me; he is my servant!’
⁷¹
So too those who keep animals can be said to serve them, not be served by them.

[A] There is as well a nobility in animals such that, from want of courage, no lion has ever been enslaved to another lion; no horse to another horse. We go out to hunt animals: lions and tigers go out to hunt men; each beast practises a similar sport against another: hounds against hares; pike against tenches; swallows against grasshoppers; sparhawks against blackbirds and skylarks:

[B]
serpente ciconia pullos
Nutrit, et inventa per devia rura lacerta,
Et leporem aut capream famulae Jovis, et generosae
In saltu venantur aves
.

[The stork feeds her young on snakes and on lizards found in trackless country places; eagles, those noble birds, servants of Jupiter, hunt hares and roes in the forests.]
⁷²

We share the fruits of the chase with our hounds and our hawks, as well as its skill and hardships. In Thrace, above Amphipolis, huntsmen and wild falcons each share a half of the booty, very exactly, just as the fisherman by the marshes of the Sea of Azov sets aside, in good faith, half of his catch for the wolves: if not, they go and tear his nets.

[A] We have a kind of hunting conducted more with cunning than with force, as when we use gin-traps, hooks and lines. Similar things are found among beasts. Aristotle relates that the cuttle-fish casts a line of gut
from its neck, pays it out and lets it float. When it wants to, it draws it in. It spots some little fish approaching, remains hiding in the sand or mud and allows it to nibble at the end of the gut and gradually draws it in until that little fish is so close it can pounce on it.

As for force, no animal in the world is liable to so many shocks as Man. No need for a whale, an elephant, a crocodile or animals like that, any one of which can destroy a great number of men. Lice were enough to make Sylla’s dictatorship vacant; and the heart and life-blood of a great and victorious Emperor serve as breakfast for some tiny worm.

Why do we say, in the case of Man, that distinguishing plants which are useful for life or for medicines from those which are not (recognizing, say, the virtues of rhubarb or polypody) is a sign that he has scientific knowledge based on skill and reason? Yet the goats of Candia can be seen picking out dittany from a million other plants when they are wounded by spears; if a tortoise swallows a viper it at once goes in search of origanum as a purge; the dragon wipes its eyes clear and bright with fennel; storks give themselves salt-water enemas; elephants can remove darts and javelins thrown in battle from their own bodies, from those of their fellows and even from those of their masters (witness the elephant of that King Porus who was killed by Alexander); they do so with more skill than we ever could while causing so little pain. Why do we not call it knowledge and discretion in their case? To lower them in esteem we allege that Nature alone is their Schoolmaster; but that is not to deprive them of knowledge or wisdom: it is to attribute them to them more surely than to ourselves, out of respect for so certain a Teacher.

In all other cases Chrysippus was as scornful a judge of the properties of animals as any philosopher there ever was, yet he watched the actions of a dog which came upon three crossroads – it was either looking for its master or chasing some game fleeing before it; it tried first one road then a second; then, having made sure that neither of them bore any trace of what it was looking for, it charged down the third road without hesitation. Chrysippus was forced to admit that that dog at least reasoned this way: ‘I have tracked my master as far as these crossroads; he must have gone down one of these three paths; not this one; not that one; so, inevitably, he must have gone down this other one.’ Convinced by this reasoned conclusion, it did not sniff at the third path; it made no further investigations but let itself be swayed by the power of reason. Here was pure dialectic: the dog made use of disjunctive and copulative propositions and adequately enumerated the parts. Does it matter whether he learned all this from himself or from the
Dialectica
of George of Trebizond?

Yet beasts, like us, are not incapable of instruction. Blackbirds, ravens, magpies and parrots can be taught to speak:
⁷³
we recognize in them a capacity for making their voice and their breath subtle and pliant enough for us to mould and restrict them to a definite number of letters and syllables. That capacity witnesses to an inward power of reasoning which makes them teachable – and willing to learn. We have all had our fill I expect of the sort of monkey-tricks which minstrels teach their dogs to do: those dances in which they never miss a note they hear or those varied jumps and movements which they perform on command. But I am much more moved to wonder by the action of the guide-dogs used by the blind in town and country, common enough as they are. I have watched those dogs stop at certain doors where people regularly give alms, and seen how, even when there is room enough to squeeze through themselves, they still avoid encounters with carts and coaches; I have seen one, following the town trench but abandoning a level, even path for a worse one, in order to keep its master away from the ditch. How was that dog brought to realize that it was its duty to neglect its own interests and to serve its master? How does it know that a path might be wide enough for itself but not wide enough for a blind man? Could all that be grasped without thought and reasoning?

I should not overlook what Plutarch tells us about a dog he saw with the elder Vespasian, the Emperor, in the theatre of Marcellus in Rome. This dog served a juggler who was putting on a play with several scenes and several parts. The dog had its own part: it had to pretend, among other things, to swallow some poison and to lie dead for a while. First it swallowed the supposedly poisoned bread; then it began to shake and tremble as though it were dizzy; finally, it lay down and stiffened as though it were dead. It let itself be pulled about and dragged from one place to another, as the plot required. Then, when it knew the time was right, it began to stir very gently, as though awakening from a deep sleep and raised its head, looking from side to side in a way which made the audience thunderstruck.