And do we consider that it may possibly be so? Does this reflected knowledge of oneself exist among inferior races, if it does not exist among animals? Certainly we shall never maintain that these last enjoy such a faculty, the source of all our legislation, and that which has made us what we are. But we ask if it is well proved whether all human races possess it. If we do not allow innate ideas to the orang, as F. Cuvier[69] would do, be it so, but let it be remembered that certain philosophers have refused them to man himself. We ourselves agree that an animal has no abstract notion of right or duty, or any idea of a divinity,[70] but it must also be remembered that certain people have not even a word for the purpose of expressing these things, and it is M. de Quatrefages himself who avows it.[71] We refer these persons to the following account of animal economy, and we think that they will not deny their application to various African and Oceanic tribes. “Ideas, abstract ideas, arise from their own domain; the past, that which preceded their birth; the future, that which will follow their death, does not occupy their attention; the present is their only business in life. They do not demand ‘Whence do I come? What am I? Where am I going?’ And they have no idea whatsoever of a Divinity.”[72] Bayle, Maupertuis,[73] and M. Flourens have, one after another, declared how difficult it is to fix a limit, to say where the intellect of animals ceases, and where that of man commences. That limit escapes even ourselves; whilst separating two terms specifically distinct we only see one continued line from the other vertebrate animals to mankind, without any clearly defined demarcation,--the organism only of one mammifer as separated by an unbroken limit from the organism of another. It is a chain of which the links, if we wish, may go on increasing from one extremity to the other, following a given progression, but without ceasing to be _like_, and consequently comparable amongst themselves. A certain number of links may be wanting, but the mind re-establishes them, and the continuity, although an abstraction, is not the less real. It is even, if we may say so, the track of a hyperbolic curve, interrupted here and there, of which only the arcs remain, quite different, and all, however, reducible by the mind to one and the same system. Unity of composition is the condition of all harmony, the necessary rule of nature. As to ourselves, we only see everywhere the same faculties, extended and developed among the superior vertebrate animals; having even acquired among mankind the singular property of aggrandising itself almost _ad infinitum_, confined among other vertebrata, enclosed in a small circle, where they can even escape our own means of knowledge.