[61] Sometimes this restraint is openly avowed; and we see M. Maire, who is also engaged upon the same questions, admit that, without these influences, he would embrace the same ideas that we are endeavouring to bring forward. “Let us frankly avow,” he says, “if we had not continually before our minds the doctrines of a religion which we respect,--if we had not a sincere faith, this intuitive belief which tells us we _must_ make a mistake,--we should dare to write thus. The more the organisation of the animal is perfected, the more the spiritual element produced by the action of the various functions is itself perfected.... There would then be only a hierarchical gradation of one and the same principle. The psychical fluid would be always the same in all individuals. The difference in its manifestations would refer to the difference in the organisations which produce them” (_Société Havraise d’Etudes Diverses_, p. 169, 1855-1856). [62] [We cannot exactly see why it must necessarily have been offensive to Christianity. There is nothing injurious to religion in the theory of intellectual gradation.--EDITOR.] [63] Jam vero nobis ostendendum est eam (bestia) habere rationem internam et intus conceptam. Videtur sane a nostra differre, non essentia sed gradu. Uti nonnulli existimant Deorum a nostra discrepare rationem, non differentia essentiali, sed quod illorum magis, nostra minus sit accurata. Et quidem quod ad sensum attinet et reliquam, tum instrumentorum sensus, tum carnis universæ, conformationem attinet, eam eodem nobiscum modo se habere in animalibus, ab omnibus fere conceditur.--Porphyrius, transl. by Holsteinius, _De Abstinentiâ_, 1655, p. 108. Is not unity of composition here conjectured, both for the intellect and the body? [64] _Disquisitio de Animâ Brutorum_, Bremæ, 1676. [65] _Logicæ Brutorum_, Hamburg, 1697. This little treatise, in spite of the extreme ideas of its author, is not the less precious. J. Stahl was one of those wells of learning which Germany has so often produced. There is, perhaps, not one passage in the old authors who wrote on this point to which he has not referred in his work. [66] See, among others, S. Gros, _De Animâ Brutorum_, Wittemberg, 1680; Klemnius, _De Animâ Brutorum_, Vittembergiæ, 1704. [67] Upon this point, M. de Quatrefages agrees with M. Flourens; but the distinction which he endeavours to establish, being based upon _morality_ and _religion_, seems to us much more restricted and much less clear. Not being able to answer everybody, we have been obliged to attend merely to the opinions of that partisan of the human kingdom who gives to animals the largest portion of it. [68] Proudhon says, in language which is even more concise and affirmative, “In man, the mind knows itself; whilst elsewhere it seems to us that it does not do so” (_Système des Contradictions économiques_, vol. i, 1850, p. 20). [69] _Annales du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle_, vol. xvi, p. 58.