VII: That All Beings, Without Exception, Are Subject to Eternal Laws

What are the effects of this eternal power that dwells essentially in nature? I see only two classes of them, the insensitive and the sensitive.

The earth, the seas, the planets, the suns, seem admirable but lifeless things, devoid of sensibility. A snail that wills, has some degree of perception, and makes love, seems, to that extent, to have an advantage greater than all the glory of the suns that illumine space.

But all these beings are alike subject to eternal and unvarying laws.

Neither the sun, nor the snail, nor the oyster, nor the dog, nor the ape, nor man, has given himself any one of the things which he has; it is evident that they have received everything.

Man and the dog are born, unwittingly, of a mother who has brought them into the world in spite of herself. Both of them suck the mother’s breast without knowing what they do, and they do this in virtue of a very delicate and complex mechanism, the nature of which is known to few men.

Both of them have, after a time, ideas, memory, and will; the dog much earlier than the man.

If the animals were mere machines, it would be another argument for the position of those who believe that man also is a mere machine; but there are now none who do not admit that the animals have ideas, memory, and a measure of intelligence, and that they improve their knowledge; that a hunting-dog learns its work, an old fox is more astute than a young one, and so on.

Whence have they these faculties, if not from the primordial eternal cause, the principle of action, the great being that animates the whole of nature?

Man obtains the faculties of the animals much later than they, but in a higher degree; can he obtain them from any other source?

He has nothing but what the great being has given him. It would be a strange contradiction, a singular absurdity, if all the stars and elements, the animals and plants, obeyed, unceasingly and irresistibly, the laws of the great being, and man alone were independent of them.