ABSTRACT
We need here to consider another bad consequence of our traditional dualism - a quite misleading conception of the nature of non-human animals. This confusion still haunts us, though it is now under attack. Descartes notoriously ruled that animals could not be conscious because they were simply automata. Like his contemporaries he was fascinated by the ingenious clockwork models that were beginning to be produced in his day. And, since many of them were actually images of animals, he readily supposed that real animals could be worked in the same way. This idea fitted well with the physicists' current view that all motion was produced by impact, something that cogs and sprockets could easily produce. It made mechanism seem a plausible explanation for movement throughout the realm of nature.
