11. Brutes abstract not, yet are not bare machines. Nor can it be
imputed to their want of fit organs to frame articulate sounds, that
they have no use or knowledge of general words; since many of them, we
find, can fashion such sounds, and pronounce words distinctly
enough, but never with any such application. And, on the other side,
men who, through some defect in the organs, want words, yet fail not
to express their universal ideas by signs, which serve them instead of
general words, a faculty which we see beasts come short in. And,
therefore, I think, we may suppose, that it is in this that the
species of brutes are discriminated from man: and it is that proper
difference wherein they are wholly separated, and which at last widens
to so vast a distance. For if they have any ideas at all, and are
not bare machines, (as some would have them,) we cannot deny them to
have some reason. It seems as evident to me, that they do some of them
in certain instances reason, as that they have sense; but it is only
in particular ideas, just as they received them from their senses.
They are the best of them tied up within those narrow bounds, and have
not (as I think) the faculty to enlarge them by any kind of
abstraction.
12. Idiots and madmen. How far idiots are concerned in the want or
weakness of any, or all of the foregoing faculties, an exact
observation of their several ways of faultering would no doubt
discover.
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