16. Monsters.
But it is the issue of rational parents, and must therefore be concluded to have a rational soul. I
know not by what logic you must so conclude. I am sure this is a conclusion that men nowhere allow of. For if
they did, they would not make bold, as everywhere they do, to destroy ill-formed and mis-shaped productions.
Ay, but these are monsters. Let them be so: what will your drivelling, unintelligent, intractable changeling be?
Shall a defect in the body make a monster; a defect in the mind (the far more noble, and, in the common phrase,
the far more essential part) not? Shall the want of a nose, or a neck, make a monster, and put such issue out of the
rank of men; the want of reason and understanding, not? This is to bring all back again to what was exploded just
now: this is to place all in the shape, and to take the measure of a man only by his outside. To show that according
to the ordinary way of reasoning in this matter, people do lay the whole stress on the figure, and resolve the whole
essence of the species of man (as they make it) into the outward shape, how unreasonable soever it be, and how
much soever they disown it, we need but trace their thoughts and practice a little further, and then it will plainly
appear. The well-shaped changeling is a man, has a rational soul, though it appear not: this is past doubt, say you:
make the ears a little longer, and more pointed, and the nose a little flatter than ordinary, and then you begin to
boggle: make the face yet narrower, flatter, and longer, and then you are at a stand: add still more and more of the
likeness of a brute to it, and let the head be perfectly that of some other animal, then presently it is a monster; and
it is demonstration with you that it hath no rational soul, and must be destroyed. Where now (I ask) shall be the
just measure; which the utmost bounds of that shape, that carries with it a rational soul? For, since there have been
human fœtuses produced, half beast and half man; and others three parts one, and one part the other; and so it is
possible they may be in all the variety of approaches to the one or the other shape, and may have several degrees
of mixture of the likeness of a man, or a brute;--I would gladly know what are those precise lineaments, which,
according to this hypothesis, are or are not capable of a rational soul to be joined to them. What sort of outside is
the certain sign that there is or is not such an inhabitant within? For till that be done, we talk at random of man:
and shall always, I fear, do so, as long as we give ourselves up to certain sounds, and the imaginations of settled
and fixed species in nature, we know not what. But, after all, I desire it may be considered, that those who think
they have answered the difficulty, by telling us, that a mis-shaped fœtus is a monster, run into the same fault they
are arguing against; by constituting a species between man and beast. For what else, I pray, is their monster in the
case, (if the word monster signifies anything at all,) but something neither man nor beast, but partaking somewhat
of either? And just so is the changeling before mentioned. So necessary is it to quit the common notion of species
and essences, if we will truly look into the nature of things, and examine them by what our faculties can discover
in them as they exist, and not by groundless fancies that have been taken up about them.
