Chapter 2.—Man Alone of Animate Creatures Perceives
the Eternal Reasons of Things Pertaining to the Body.
2. And the beasts, too, are able
both to perceive things corporeal from without, through the senses
of the body, and to fix them in the memory, and remember them, and
in them to seek after things suitable, and shun things
inconvenient. But to note these things, and to retain them not only
as caught up naturally but also as deliberately committed to
memory, and to imprint them again by recollection and conception
when now just slipping away into forgetfulness; in order that as
conception is formed from that which the memory contains, so also
the contents themselves of the memory may be fixed firmly by
thought: to combine again imaginary objects of sight, by taking
this or that of what the memory remembers, and, as it were, tacking
them to one another: to examine after what manner it is that in
this kind things like the true are to be distinguished from the
true, and this not in things spiritual, but in corporeal things
themselves;—these acts, and the like, although performed in
reference to things sensible, and those which the mind has deduced
through the bodily senses, yet, as they are combined with reason,
so are not common to men and beasts. But it is the part of the
higher reason to judge of these corporeal things according to
incorporeal and eternal reasons; which, unless they were above the
human mind, would certainly not be unchangeable; and yet, unless
something of our own were subjoined to them, we should not be able
to employ them as our measures by which to judge of corporeal
things. But we judge of corporeal things from the rule of
dimensions and figures, which the mind knows to remain
unchangeably.
744
744
[The distinction drawn here is
between that low form of intelligence which exists in the brute,
and that high form characteristic of man. In the Kantian
nomenclature, the brute has understanding, but unenlightened by
reason; either theoretical or practical. He has intelligence, but
not as modified by the forms of space and time and the categories
of quantity, quality, relation etc.; and still less as modified and
exalted by the ideas of reason—namely, the mathematical ideas,
and the moral ideas of God, freedom, and immortality. The animal
has no
rational
intelligence. He has mere understanding
without reason.—W.G.T.S.]