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what perhaps can be seen as a particularly English spirit of outrage
on this subject:
But there is nothing in your opinions that so much disgusts me, so far
as I have any kindness or gentleness, as the internecine and murder-
ous view which you bring forward in the Method, which snatches away
life and sensibility from all the animals . . .
Descartes replies (5 February 1649: V 276 7, K 243 5) at some
length, and is prepared to say that we cannot prove that there is no
thought in animals, since our mind does not penetrate their
hearts , but he does think that all their responses are purely mech-
anical, and that they are, as he puts it to More, natural automata .
His principal ground for this view, as he originally said in the fifth
part of the Discourse (VI 56 7, HR1 117), is that animals, even
higher animals such as monkeys, have no universal application of
intelligence, but only limited responses or routines and, above all,
have no use of language at all, as opposed to a repertoire of
delimited signals; and this is not because they lack the physical
means of expressing themselves, since parrots and other animals
are capable of making even human vocal sounds, and animals gen-
erally display behaviour which expresses their passions (cf. also a
letter to the Marquis of Newcastle, 23 November 1646: IV 573 6, K
206 8).6
These passions of animals are to be regarded as purely physical
disturbances in the nervous system, which can generate behaviour,
but are not associated with experiences. He says in the letter to the
Marquis of Newcastle:
So far as the movements of our passions are concerned, while in us
they are accompanied by thought, because we have the faculty of
thought, it is nevertheless very obvious that they do not depend on
270 mind and its place in nature
thought, since they often occur against our will (malgré nous), and that
consequently they can occur in animals, and indeed more violently
than they occur in us, without one s being able to conclude from that
that animals have thoughts.
(IV 573 4, K 206)
The situation is similar with the sense-perceptions of animals. I
have earlier referred (see p. 211) to a passage (IV Rep.: VII 230, HR2
104) in which Descartes says that the flight of the sheep on seeing
the wolf is behaviour mechanically caused by light reflected from
the body of the wolf, without what Descartes would regard as a
genuinely psychological intermediate stage, that is to say, a state of
consciousness.
Some human behaviour is also of this type. Quite a lot of human
bodily movements and actions, in fact, are thought by Descartes to
bypass the soul, and to be products of self-contained mechanical
cycles within the body. Such actions or movements are not just
analogous to animal behaviour, but are produced in exactly the
same way. However, Descartes s specification of this class of
movements or actions suffers considerably from vagueness and
from his appealing to what seem to be several non-equivalent cri-
teria. In the passage from the Fourth Replies and in the letter to
Newcastle (cf. also Description of the Human Body, XI 224 ff.), he
variously refers to such bodily processes as heart beating and diges-
tion; to breathing when one is asleep; to actions performed by
sleep-walkers; to reflexes such as stretching out one s hand to ward
off a blow; and to walking and singing that one does when awake
but without thinking about it. It is obvious that no one distinction
bearing on this question is marked by all these examples. Some are
not actions at all. Some are actions of which the agent is aware (he
monitors his behaviour in walking, for instance, though thinking of
something else), but not reflexively aware. Some are actions, or
again movements, of which he is even reflexively aware, but which
he cannot prevent himself from performing. This last condition
Descartes explicitly mentions in the Fourth Replies but that, very
obviously, does not apply at all to walking when one s mind is on
something else.
mind and its place in nature 271
It is hardly surprising that Descartes s account is unclear on this
point, since he is engaged in an impossible task, of sorting all
human movements into two sharply delimited classes, as having
ultimately different causal histories, one which does, and one which
does not, involve the intervention of the mind . It is one product of
his all or nothing account of mind and consciousness: either a
creature has the full range of conscious powers, and is capable of
language and abstract thought as well as sensation and feelings of
hunger, or it is an automaton, with no experience of any kind. This
feature of the theory not only distorts, as we have just seen, the
action or output side of the account. It also causes obscurity on the
question of the status and nature of the conscious aspect of sensa-
tions. In a human being, who has the faculty of thought, a pain, an
emotional feeling, a sensation of hunger, a visual image, perceptual
experiences, all have for Descartes a purely conscious aspect; we
may remember from the Doubt that we could accept these experi-
ences just as experiences while we still doubted the body (see p. 64).
Later reflection suggested that one would not have such experi-
ences if one did not have a body, and Descartes thinks that these
experiences are perceptions of states of the body, transmitted to the
soul via the pineal gland. In the case of perception, and perceptual
memory and imagination, the body contains some kind of corpor-
eal representation or image (see p. 225). In performing these func-
tions, the mind turns towards or applies itself to these corporeal
representations (V Rep.: VII 387, HR2 231; Conversation with
Burman: V 162, C p. 27).
How are we to conceive the modification of the soul that this
produces?7 Certainly no corporeal species can be received into the
mind , as he says in the passage of the Fifth Replies, and nothing
in the mind can have the essentially corporeal characteristic of
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