ABSTRACT
A child is born into the world. At this point of time, when the child is just born, some would say that it is in effect simply an animal. It has undoubtedly something, indeed a great deal, of a human shape, and it possesses the physiological and other bodily equipment that will eventually make possible the performance of characteristic human functions, many of which will constitute distinguishing marks from the merely animal. (What those distinguishing marks are and whether there is anything that constitutes a clear and definite dividing line between the human and the animal is a question which I shall not discuss at this point. It has often been said that man possesses reason and animals do not, that man can use language and animals cannot, even that man has a soul and animals have not. I think that most of these claims for a sharp distinction become eroded after close examination and investigation. None of this, however, prevents it being the case that there are characteristic human functions and qualities, whether or not these are in any sense absolute.) A new-born child is even capable of certain forms of expression that one does not find in all animals, e.g. crying, though not as yet perhaps smiling or similar expressions of pleasure. Hence, to say that at this time the child is in effect simply an animal is to put a great deal of weight on the words 'in effect'. Indeed a new-born child lacks many of the functions and capacities of a grown animal, even a fairly lowly one; its sense-organs, for example, are very undeveloped and have at the best limited use. It would be fairer to say that a child is at this stage a living organism of a recognisably animal kind, but one which has not developed many of the functional capacities that animals in general come to possess, and even less of what we regard as characteristically human. Yet the child is equally and obviously a little human being; all being well, it will become what we fully recognise as such.
