ABSTRACT
René Descartes reasoned that non-human animals did not have reason or significant feelings, a view that promoted scientific experiments but that Charles Darwin two centuries later was to deny.1 The dualism that considers the soul or anima separate from the body it animates, and that only human beings have rational and immortal souls, suggested that animals are automata, moved by the action of animal spirits-physical emanations of the blood-on their material bodies, and enabled by instinct to carry out their tasks of survival and reproduction, but having negligible capacities for suffering and joy. That opinion broke away from deep roots of poetry and moral philosophy, and was to be contested by some natural philosophers as an impulse of empathy began to grow. Michel de Montaigne, whose Essays appeared in English in 1607, opposed a strictly instrumental attitude to any living thing on moral grounds: “There [is] a kinde of respect, and a general duty of humanity, which tieth us not only unto brute beasts that have life and sense, but even unto trees and plants.”2While some proto-scientists were developing an abstract language free of imagination and feeling, poets developed a language of empathy and particularity; and natural historians themselves, even in the process of collecting and dissecting, often exclaimed at the beauty or divine wisdom or possible inner lives of the objects of their study, and eventually began to think that animals had a right to enjoy their lives.
