Bruno’s prophetic guess that instinct is inherited habit might have saved Descartes (who was much indebted to the Nolan) from giving his name an unenviable immortality in connexion with the theory which is nearly all that the ignorant know now of Cartesian philosophy. This was the theory that animals are automata, a sophism that may be said to have swept Europe, though it was not long before it provoked a reaction. Descartes got this idea from the very place where it was likely to originate, from Spain. A certain Gomez Pereira advanced it before Descartes made it his own, which even led to a charge of plagiarism. “Because a clock marks time and a bee makes honey, we are to consider the clock and the bee to be machines. Because they do one thing better than man and no other thing so well as man, we are to conclude that they have no mind, but that Nature acts within them, holding their organs at her disposal.” “Nor are we to think, as the ancients do, that animals speak, though we do not know their language, for, if that were so, they, having several organs related to ours, might as easily communicate with us as with each other.” About this, Huxley showed that an almost imperceptible imperfection of the vocal chord may prevent articulated sounds. Moreover, the click of the bushmen, which is almost their only language, is exceedingly like the sounds made by monkeys. Language, as defined by an eminent Italian man of science, Professor Broca, is the faculty of making things known, or expressing them by signs or sounds. Much the same definition was given by Mivart, and if there be a better one, we have still to wait for it. Human language is evolved; at one time man had it not. The babe in the cradle is without it; the deaf mute, in his untaught state, is without it; _ergo_ the babe and the deaf mute cannot feel. Poor babes and poor deaf mutes should the scientific Loyolas of the future adopt this view! I do not know if any one has remarked that rural and primitive folk can never bring themselves to believe of any foreign tongue that it is real human language like their own. To them it seems a jargon of meaningless and uncouth sounds. Chanet, a follower of Descartes, said that he would believe that beasts thought when a beast told him so. By what cries of pain, by what looks of love, have not beasts told men that they thought! Man himself does not think in words in moments of profound emotion, whether of grief or joy. _He cries out_ or he _acts_. Thought in its absolutely elementary form is _action_. The mother thinks in the kiss she gives her child. The musician thinks in music. Perhaps God thinks in constellations. I asked a man who had saved many lives by jumping into the sea, “What did you think of at the moment of doing it?” He replied: “You do not think, or you might not do it.”