CHAPTER II. COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY. On one occasion, two monkeys were brought into the presence of the orang described by Grant, about which we spoke in the last chapter. They were led by a chain up to the animal, and were threatened with a stick. “During the whole interview,” says our informant, “the grave commanding attitude and bearing of the orang, compared to the levity and apparent sense of inferiority of the monkeys, was very striking, and it was impossible not to feel that he was a creature of a much more elevated order and capacity.”[56] “The animal from Sumatra is neither a man nor an ape,” said the crowd before the orang at the Museum. The communications which were then made to the Institute by Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire may be, one of these days, a new triumph for him, the forerunner of a science which is not yet in existence,--the study of intellect in animals, based upon observation and experience; as for instance, in the passage where he proposes to submit the orang to a methodical education, in order to study the modifications which would be caused by such an alteration of method.[57] He who has discovered organic unity, will have placed us in the way of a discovery not less important, that of psychological unity.[58] A new science, which would only date from the time of the reaction against Cartesian ideas,--a science still without a name, merely touched upon even by great minds which have the inestimable privilege of understanding everything; it has never been _studied_,--never thoroughly investigated,--never submitted to all our means of information.[59] We should call it _Comparative Psychology_. We should, then, re-enter into one great _Unity_. The intellect of vertebrate animals would be identical, as their organism is identical; thus gradually descending, passing through the orang, from man himself to all the mammalia. It may be said that these propositions are not yet proved,--at least it will be allowed, seeing what has passed during a very few years, that the last word has not yet been said concerning the intellect of animals.