Davy Sees Freedom in Human Fallability

The experience of ‘paralytic strokes’ (like his father’s), which destroyed ‘perception and Memory’ as well as physical motion, proved that the physical brain was the single centre of ‘all the Mental faculties’. Children were not magically endowed with intelligence and souls at birth. On the contrary: ‘A Child is not superior in Intellectual power to a common earthworm. It can scarcely move at will. It has not even that active instinctive capacity for Self-Preservation.’ Such...

 The Term "Higher Animals"

So glibly do the phrases 'higher animals' and 'lower animals' trip off our tongues that it comes as a shock to realize that, far from effortlessly slotting into evolutionary thinking as one might suppose, they were - and are - deeply antithetical to it. We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or...