Day 84: Animals and Men

Animals and Men more extracts from The Spirits' Book by Allan Kardec

592. If we compare man with the animals in reference to intelligence, it seems difficult to draw a line of demarcation between them; for some animals are, in this respect, notoriously superior to some men. Is it possible to establish such a line of demarcation with any precision?
“Your philosophers are far from being agreed upon this point. Some of them will have it that man is an animal; others are equally sure that the animal is a man. They are all wrong. Man is a being apart, who sometimes sinks himself very low, or who may raise himself very high. As regards his physical nature, man is like the animals, and less well provided for than many of them; for nature has given to them all that man is obliged to invent with the aid of his intelligence for his needs and his preservation. His body is subject to destruction, like that of the animals; but his spirit has a destiny that he alone can understand, because he alone is completely free. Poor human beings who debase yourselves below the brutes! Do you not know how to distinguish yourselves from them? Recognise the superiority of man by his possessing the notion of the existence of God.”

593. Can the animals be said to act only from instinct?
“That, again, is a mere theory. It is very true that instinct predominates in the greater number of animals; but do you not see some of them act with a determinate will? This is intelligence; but of narrow range.”
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594. Have animals a language?
“If you mean a language formed of words and syllables, no; but if you mean a method of communication among themselves, yes. They say much more to one another than you suppose; but their language is limited, like their ideas, to their bodily wants.”
- There are animals who have no voice; have they no language?
“They understand one another by other means. Have men no other method of communicating with one another than by speech? And the dumb, what do you say of them? The animals, being endowed with the life of relation, have means of giving one another information, and of expressing the sensations they feel. Do you suppose that fishes have no understanding among themselves? Man has not the exclusive privilege of language; but that of the animals is instinctive and limited to the scope of their wants and ideas, while that of man is perfectible, and lends itself to all the conceptions of his intelligence.”

595. Have animals free-will in regard to their actions?
“They are not the mere machines you suppose them to be; but their freedom of action is limited to their wants, and cannot be compared to that of man. Being far inferior to him, they have not the same duties. Their freedom is restricted to the acts of their material life.”

596. Whence comes the aptitude of certain animals to imitate human speech, and why is this aptitude found among birds, rather, for instance, than among apes, whose conformation has so much more analogy to that of man?
“That aptitude results from a particular conformation of the vocal organs, seconded by the instinct of imitation. The ape imitates man’s gestures; birds imitate his voice.”

597. Since the animals have an intelligence which gives them a certain degree of freedom of action, is there, in them, a principle independent of matter?
“Yes; and that survives their body.”
- Is this principle a soul, like that of man?
“It is a soul, if you like to call it so; that depends on the meaning you attach to this word. But it is inferior to that of man. There is, between the soul of the animals and that of man, as great a difference as there is between the soul of man and God.”

598. Does the soul of the animals preserve, after death, its individuality and its self-consciousness?
“It preserves its individuality, but not the consciousness of its me. The life of intelligence remains latent in them.”

599. Does the soul of the beasts the choice of incarnating itself in one kind of animal rather than in another?
“No; it does not possess free-will.”

600. As the soul of the animal survives its body, is it, after death, in a state of erraticity, like that of man?
“It is in a sort of erraticity, because it is not united to a body; but it is not an errant spirit. The errant spirit is a being who thinks and acts of his own free-will; but the soul of the animal has not the same faculty, for it is his self-consciousness which is the principal attribute of the spirit. The soul of the animal is classed after its death, by the spirits charged with that work, and almost immediately utilised; it has not the leisure to enter into connection with other creatures.”

601. Do animals follow a law progress like men?
“Yes; and it is for this reason that, in the higher worlds in which men are further advanced, the animals are more advanced also, and possess more developed means of communication. But they are always inferior to man; and subject to him; they are, for him, intelligent servitors.”
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602. Do animals progress, like man, through the action of their will, or through the force of things?
“Through the force of things; this is why there is, for them, no expiation.”

603. Have the animals, in the higher worlds, a knowledge of God?
“No; man is a god for them, as spirits were formerly gods for men.”

604. The animals, even the advanced ones of the higher worlds, being always inferior to man, it would seem as though God had created intellectual beings condemned to a perpetual inferiority; such an arrangement does not appear to be in accordance with the unity of design and of progress discernible in all His works.
“Everything in nature is linked together by an enchaining which your intellect cannot yet seize; and things apparently the most discrepant have points of contact at the comprehension of which man will never arrive in his actual state. He may obtain a glimmering of them through an effort of his intelligence; but it is only when that intelligence shall have acquired its full development, and shall have freed itself from the prejudices of pride and of ignorance, that he will be able to see clearly into the work of God; until then, his narrowness of thought causes him to look at everything ffrom a low and petty point of view. Know that God cannot contradict Himself, and that everything in nature is harmonised by the action of general laws that never deviate from the sublime wisdom of the Creator.”
- Intelligence, then, is a common property, and a point of contact, between the soul of the beast and that of man?
“Yes, but the animals have only the intelligence of material life; in man, intelligence gives moral life.”

605. If we consider all the points of contact that exist between man and the animals, does it not seem as though man possessed two souls – viz., an animal soul and a spiritual soul, and that, if he had not the latter, he might still live, but as a brute; in other words, that the animal is a being similar to man, minus the spiritual soul? From which it would follow that the good and bad instincts of man result from the predominance of one or the other of these two souls.
“No, man has not two souls; but the body has its instincts resulting from the sensation of its organs. There is in him only a double nature – the animal nature and the spiritual nature. By his body he participates in the nature of the animals and their instincts; by his soul he participates in the nature of spirits.”
- Thus, besides his own imperfection, which he has to get rid of, a spirit has also to struggle against the influence of matter?
“Yes, the lower a spirit’s degree of advancement, the closer are the bonds which united him with matter. Do you not see that it must necessarily be so? No; man has not two souls: the soul is always one in a single being. The soul of the animal and that of man are distinct from one another, so that the soul of the one cannot animate the body created for the other. But if man have not an animal soul, placing him, by its passions, on a level with the animals, he has his body, which often drags him down to them; for his body is a being endowed with vitality, and that has its instincts, but unintelligent, and limited to the care of its own preservation.”
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606. Whence do the animals derive the intelligent principle that constitutes the particular kind of soul with which they are endowed?
“From the universal intelligent element.”
- The intelligence of man and of the animals emanates, then, from one and the same principle?
“Undoubtedly; but, in man, it has received an elaboration which raises it above that which animates the brute.”

607. You have stated that the soul of man, at its origin, is in a state analogous to that of human infancy, that its intelligence is only beginning to unfold itself, and that it is essaying to live (190); where does the soul accomplish this earliest phase of its career?
“In a series of existences which precede the period of development that you call humanity.”
The soul would seem, then, to have been the intelligent principle of the inferior orders of creation?
“Have we not said everything in nature is linked together and tends to unity? It is in those beings, of which you are very far from knowing all, that the intelligent principle is elaborated, is gradually individualised, and made ready to live, as we have said, through its subjection to a sort of preparatory process, like that of germination, on the conclusion of which that principle undergoes a transformation and becomes spirit. It is then that the period of humanity commences for each spirit with the sense of futurity, the power of distinguishing between good and evil, and the responsibility of his actions; just as, after the period of infancy comes that of childhood, then youth, adolescence, and ripened manhood. Is the greatest genius humiliated by having been a shapeless foetus in his mother’s womb? If anything ought to humiliate him, it is his lowness in the scale of being, and his powerlessness to sound the depths of the divine designs and the wisdom of the laws that regulate the harmonies of the universe. Recognise the greatness of God in this admirable harmony that establishes solidarity between everything in nature. To think that God could have made anything without a purpose, and have created intelligent beings without a future, would be to blaspheme His goodness, which extends over all His creatures.
Does this period of humanity commence upon our earth?
“The earth is not the starting-point of the earliest phase of human incarnation; the human period commences, in general, in worlds still lower than yours. This, however, is not an absolute rule; and it may happen that a spirit, at his entrance upon the human phase, may be fitted to live upon the earth. Such a case, however, though possible, is infrequent; and would be an exception to the general rule.”

608. Has a man’s spirit, after death, any consciousness of the existences that have preceded his entrance upon the human period?
“No; for it is only with this period that his life, as a spirit, has begun for him. He can scarcely recall his earliest existences as a man; just as a man no longer remembers the earliest days of his infancy, and still less the time he passed in his mother’s womb. This is why spirits tell you that they do not know how they began.”

609. Does a spirit, when once he has entered upon the human period, retain any traces of what he has previously been, that is to say, of the state in which he was in what may be called the ante-human period?
“That depends on the distance that separates the two periods, and the amount of progress accomplished. During a few generations, there may be a reflex, more or less distinct, of the primitive state, for nothing in nature takes place through an abrupt transition, and there are always links which unite the extremities of the chain of beings or of events; but those traces disappear with the development of free-will. The first steps of progress are accomplished slowly, because they are not yet seconded by the will; they are accomplished more rapidly in proportion as the spirit acquires a more perfect consciousness of himself.”

610. The spirits who have said that man is a being apart from the rest of creation are, then, mistaken?
“No, but the question had not been developed; and besides, there are things that can only be known at their appointed time. Man is, in reality, a being apart, for he has faculties that distinguish him from all others, and he has another destiny. The human species is the one which God has chosen for the incarnation of the beings that are capable of knowing Him.”