It is in my opinion a giving up of the light of reason, to pretend to assert that beasts are no more than mere machines; for is it not a manifest contradiction to acknowledge that God has given them the organs of sense, and then to affirm that they have no sense?
Besides, I think one must never have made any observation upon animals, not to distinguish in them the different cries of want, suffering, joy, fear, love, anger, and indeed all other affections of the mind or body; surely, it would be very strange that they should so well express what they have no sense of!
This remark may furnish abundant matter of reflection to inquisitive minds, in relation to the power and goodness of the Creator, who has been pleased to bestow life, sense, ideas, and memory on those beings whose organs he has formed with His own all-powerful hand. As to us, we neither know how these organs are formed, how they are unfolded, in what manner we receive life, nor by what laws sense, ideas, memory, and will are annexed to that life; and yet in this dark and ternal state of ignorance inherent to our natures, we are perpetually disputing with, and persecuting one another, like the bulls of the field, who fight with their horns, without knowing for what use, or in what manner those horns were given them.
[39] Several writers have too rashly concluded from this passage that the chapter concerning the golden calf—which is no other than the Egyptian god Apis—has, as well as many other chapters, been added to the books of Moses.
Eben-Ezra was the first who undertook to prove that the Pentateuch—or the five books of Moses—was written in the times of the Kings. Wollaston, Collins, Tindal, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and many others have asserted that in those ages men had no other way of committing their thoughts to writing but by engraving them upon polished stone, brick, lead, or wood; and tell us that in the time of Moses the Chaldæans and Egyptians had no other way of writing, and that then they could engrave but in a very abridged manner, and by hieroglyphics, the substance only of such things as they thought worthy of being transmitted to posterity, and could never form any regular histories; then it was next to an impossibility to engrave books of any considerable bulk in the wilderness, where they were continually changing their habitation; where they had no person to furnish them with clothing, to make that clothing for them, or even to mend their sandals, and where God was obliged to perform a miracle to preserve the garments of His people entire. They say that it is hardly probable that there should have been so many engravers among them, at the time that they were so deficient in the more necessary arts of life, and did not know even how to make bread; and if we answer to this, that the pillars of the tabernacle were of brass, and their chapiters of massy silver they reply, that though the order for this might have been given in the wilderness, it was not executed till after they were settled in perfect tranquillity.