Chapter 1
A False Definition Of Animal
53. The sounder naturalists, such as Linnaeus and Buffon, have no doubt that the essential characteristic of animal is found in feeling.
54. Some less noted authors seem to have doubted this.(23) Their arguments, however, indicate a total absence of logical rules in their method of defining things, and a clear tendency to materialism, where materialism is not in fact openly professed. I can understand that it is possible to abuse the word animal by making it mean anything one wishes, but the fault lies then with the person who so uses it. If it is going to be taken in an arbitrary sense, different from ordinary usage, the reader should at least be warned. He can then avoid mere questions of words.(24) To say, as some naturalists do, that not all animals show traces of sensation means presupposing either that sensation plays no part in the meaning of the word animal, or that its role is accidental. If it were essential, these authors could not maintain that the beings they are examining and in which they find no trace of sensation are animals.
If these beings are called `animals', would it not be better to employ ordinary usage which indicates that people think feeling is present in such beings? If then it is found that these beings have no feeling, they cease to be classified as animals, and take their place with vegetables or something else. What we must not do is to force on the word animal a meaning it does not possess in order to maintain certain beings in a single non-applicable species. In fact, of course, such a species would no longer be a single, but multiple species if it were composed of such different things as beings with feeling and beings without feeling.(25) Asking `What is an animal?' is a very different question from asking `Do these beings belong to the class "animal" or not?' Ordinary people can easily be deceived in answering the second question without making any mistake about the correct answer to the first.
55. If we examine the origin of the word, it is clear that animal comes from anima [soul], and means that which has a soul. Now I do not believe that anyone today holds Aristotle's theory about the vegetable soul, a hypothesis that enabled him to eliminate all difficulty encountered in explaining the growth of plants. Under cover of a word he disguised his ignorance of the special causes of this marvellous event in nature. Leaving aside, therefore, this old philosophical red-herring, which was never accepted by the man in the street, we have to say that the word anima [soul] was taken from the word for air (anemoV) which appears to move of its own accord, and was applied to the sense-principle as the principle of spontaneous movement. Why should we suppose the existence of a soul in bodies if everything happened within them as a result of external, violent movements which are sufficiently explained by physical and chemical forces or by any forces in physical nature? The name `anima' [soul] must have been chosen in order to indicate something quite different from the possibilities of activity inherent in material forces. What it indicates is sensation, the only phenomenon of nature so different from physical movement as to bear no likeness or proximity to it, although sensation has another kind of relationship with movement, which we shall touch upon later.(26)
Notes
(23) Cabanis considered life as feeling, but then used the word feeling to describe what a body does in responding with certain exterior effects to the action of stimuli. This is not feeling as Linnaeus, Buffon and ordinary people use the word.
(24) Crusca's dictionary defines animal very well as `that which has a feeling soul'.
(25) It is sad to see how many confused ideas are present in Gioia's book, Esercizio Logico. He maintains, for example, that some brute beasts lack sensibility, while others are endowed with intelligence! Our young people will derive only imperfect and imprecise ideas from such sloppiness, although their education should at the right time provide them with more accurate, trustworthy notions of things.
(26) Giacopo Sacchi was right, I think, when he opposed Brown's analogy between animals and plants on the ground that the two kinds of beings were essentially different, and that life could not be predicated univocally of both.