“Plato, in his picture of the ‘Golden Age,’ reckons amongst the chief advantages of the men of that time the communication they had with other animals, by investigating and instructing themselves in whose nature they learned their true qualities and the differences between them, by which they acquired a very perfect knowledge and intelligence, and thus made their lives more happy than we can make ours. Is a better test needed by which to judge of human folly in regard to other species? “I have said all this in order to bring us back and reunite ourselves to the crowd [_presse_]. We are [in the accidents of mortality] neither above nor below the rest. ‘All who are under the sky,’ says the Jewish sage, ‘experience a like law and fate.’ There is some difference, _there are orders and degrees_, but they are under the aspect of one and the same nature. Man must be constrained and ranged within the barriers of this police [_Il faut contraindre l’homme, et le ranger dans les barrières de cette police_]. The wretch has no right to encroach [_d’enjamber_] beyond these; he is fettered, entangled, he is subjected to like necessities with other creatures of his order, and in a very mean condition without any true and essential prerogative and pre-excellence. That which he confers upon himself by his own opinion and fancy has neither sense nor substance; and if it be conceded to him that he alone of all animals has that freedom of imagination and that irregularity of thought representing to him what he is, what he is not, and what he wants, the false and the true, it is an advantage which has been very dearly sold to him, and of which he has very little to boast, for from that springs the principal source of the evils which oppress him--crime, disease, irresolution, trouble, despair.” Rejecting the still received prejudice which will not allow our humble fellow-beings the privilege of reason, but invents an imaginary faculty called “instinct,” he repeats that-- “There is no ground for supposing that other beings do by _natural and necessary inclination_ the same things that we do by choice, and while we are bound to infer from like effects like faculties--nay, from greater effects, greater faculties--we are forced to confess, consequently, that that same reason, that same method which we employ in action are also employed by the lower animals, or else that they have some still better reason or method. Why do we fancy in them that natural necessity or impulse [_contrainte_]--_we_ who have no experience of that sort ourselves.[115]