No indeed, especially when we take into account all which exists in him. And I am sure that in this respect you all agree with me.
Certainly none of you would wish to be compared with cattle that ruminate, with hogs that wallow in the mire. Nor would you wish to be classed with the dog, notwithstanding all the qualities which make him the friend and companion of man; nor with the horse, though it should be with Gladiator,
Man is not an animal. He is widely distinguished from animals by numerous and important characters of different sorts. I shall here only refer to his intellectual superiority, to which belongs articulate speech, so that each people has its special language; writing, which permits the reproduction of this language; the fine arts, by the aid of which he conveys, and, in some sort, materializes the conceptions of his imagination. But he is distinguished from all animals by two fundamental characters which pertain only to him. Man is the only one among organized and living beings who has the abstract sentiment of good and evil; in him alone, consequently, exists moral sense.
He is also alone in the belief that there will be something after this life, and in the recognition of a Supreme Being, who can influence his life for good or for evil. It is upon this double idea that the great fact of religion rests.
By and by these two questions of morals and religion will turn up again. We shall, I repeat, examine them, not as theologians, but simply as naturalists. I will only say for the present that man, everywhere, however savage he may be, shows some signs of morality and of religion that we never find among animals.
Hence man is a being apart, separated from animals by two great characters, which, I repeat, distinguish him yet more than his incontestable intellectual superiority.
But here the differences end. So far as the body is concerned, man is an animal, nothing more, nothing less. Except some differences of form and disposition, he is the equal, only the equal, of the superior animals that surround him.
If we take, for terms of comparison, the species that approach us nearest in general form, anatomy shows us that our organs are exactly the same as theirs. We can trace in them, almost muscle by muscle and nerve by nerve, those which we find in man himself.
Physiology, in its turn, shows us, in the body of man, the organs, muscles, nerves, performing exactly the same functions as in the animal. This is a capital fact which daily profits us, both from a purely scientific and from a practical point of view. We cannot experiment upon man—we can upon animals. Human physiology has employed this means to discover the functions of our organs. Physicians go further still; they bring to the sick bed the fruit of experiments made upon animals. Anthropology also, as we have just seen, applies to these inferior creatures for very important instruction.
