Human, Animal, and Machine in the Seventeenth Century

 Lucinda Cole and Robert Markley

In his 1695 letter to John Dennis on comedy, the playwright William Congreve confesses his dislike for satire that smacks of the “Degeneration of [that] God-like Species” – “man.” Having conceded that he is disturbed by “seeing things, that force me to entertain low thoughts of my Nature,” Congreve then admits he “could never look long upon a Monkey, without very Mortifying Reflections; tho [he] never heardany thing to the Contrary, why that Creature is not Originally of a Distinct Species”(Hodges 1964: 183).

 Congreve’s “mortifying Reflections” stem from his culture's nagging fear that anatomy may be destiny – that the physiological similarities between humans and monkeys may undermine the philosophical and religious principles that grant our “God-like Species” dominion over the rest of creation. Because it unsettles distinctions between instinctual behavior and intelligent self-awareness, Congreve's monkey calls attention to a crucial set of problems in seventeenth-century thought: the difficulty of trying to distinguish humans from animals, animals from inanimate objects, and humans from machines. As Francis Bacon declared in

Of the Wisdom of the Ancients(1609), “there is no nature which can be regarded as simple”: “Man has something of the brute; the brute has something of the vegetable; the vegetable something of the inanimate body” (Bacon 1860: 13, 96; see Fudge 1999: 94–98). Totry to make sense of the complexity of nature and its hybrid forms was the central project of seventeenth-century science – or what was then termed natural philosophy

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