Nature's workmanship, they could not be so various and different in
several men as experience tells us they are. For if we will examine it,
we shall not find the nominal essence of any one species of substances
in all men the same: no, not of that which of all others we are the most
intimately acquainted with. It could not possibly be that the abstract
idea to which the name MAN is given should be different in several men,
if it were of Nature's making; and that to one it should be animal
rationale, and to another, animal implume bipes latis unguibus. He that
annexes the name man to a complex idea, made up of sense and spontaneous
motion, joined to a body of such a shape, has thereby one essence of the
species man; and he that, upon further examination, adds rationality,
has another essence of the species he calls man: by which means the same
individual will be a true man to the one which is not so to the other.
I think there is scarce any one will allow this upright figure, so well
known, to be the essential difference of the species man; and yet how
far men determine of the sorts of animals rather by their shape than
descent, is very visible; since it has been more than once debated,
whether several human foetuses should be preserved or received to
baptism or no, only because of the difference of their outward
configuration from the ordinary make of children, without knowing
whether they were not as capable of reason as infants cast in another
mould: some whereof, though of an approved shape, are never capable of
as much appearance of reason all their lives as is to be found in an
ape, or an elephant, and never give any signs of being acted by a
rational soul. Whereby it is evident, that the outward figure, which
only was found wanting, and not the faculty of reason, which nobody
could know would be wanting in its due season, was made essential to the
human species. The learned divine and lawyer must, on such occasions,
renounce his sacred definition of animal rationale, and substitute some
other essence of the human species. [Monsieur Menage furnishes us with