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.
