ut 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 foetuses
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 telli