Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

to associate other situations with those in which they naturally express

their passions. ‘There has never been any animal so perfect that it used

some sign to make known to other animals something that was not related

to their passions’ (iv.). Descartes’ conclusion is the same one he had

drawn in theDiscourse, appropriately qualified to acknowledge that it is

no more certain than any hypothesis that one might construct to explain

other natural phenomena. ‘This seems to me to be a very strong argument

to prove that the reason animals do not speak is that they have no thought,

rather than that they lack the appropriate organs’ (iv.).

The success or otherwise of Descartes’ argument about animals depends

onmaking a sharp distinction between thinking and not thinking, so that

human beings who think have an immortal soul, while animals fail on

both counts. Here, however, in response to Newcastle, he opens up the

possibility for the first time that there may be different degrees of thought

and that animals may enjoy some less perfect form of thinking. ‘One can say

only the following: although animals perform no actions which convince

us that they think, nonetheless, since their bodily organs are not very

different from ours, one could hypothesize that there is some thought

associated with these organs, as we experience in our own case, even if

their thought is much less perfect’ (iv.). Descartes seemed willing to

concede this possibility, with the qualification that ‘if they thought like us

they would have an immortal soul just like us’ (iv.).

This discussion – of what kind of thought must be attributed to animals

in order to explain their behaviour – was obviously inconclusive. It seemed

to some critics that Descartes was not only denying that animals think like

human beings, but was also contending that they lack sensory experiences,

such as pain or hunger. On the other hand, he seemed to concede that

animals enjoy a low degree of thinking that breaches the sharp dichotomy

between thinking and not thinking at all. That suggested that human

beings were in many ways similar to nonhuman animals. He returned to

that question on a later occasion. In the meantime, he had to cope with

another extremely cold winter in–that forced him to remain at

home, in Egmond-Binnen, more than he would have wished.