In his novel Penguin Island (1908), Anatole France spins a wonderful tale about a blind old monk who sets off from Brittany on a mission to the Hebrides and lands on an island inhabited only by penguins. Though the birds speak a strange language, he assumes they must be human beings. So he proceeds to baptise them.
When the news of this reaches heaven, it causes a major stir. God himself is embarrassed. He gathers an assembly of clerics and doctors, and asks them for an opinion on the delicate question of whether the birds must now be given souls. It is a matter of more than theoretical importance. ‘The Christian state,’ St Cornelius points out, ‘is not without serious inconveniences for a penguin … The habits of birds are, in many points, contrary to the commandments of the Church …’ After lengthy discussion, they settle on a compromise. The baptised penguins are indeed to be granted souls – but, on St Catherine’s recommendation, their souls are to be of small size.
For the penguins, souls were an unexpected bonus. As René Descartes, the philosopher-scientist of the 17th century, had explained, nonhuman animals in general, in a state of nature, are mere soulless machines. Here’s a sketch of a Cartesian penguin, without even a smidgen of a soul.
Descartes believed that humans too are machines of a kind. But he held that, with humans, thankfully, God has arranged the addition of a soul as standard practice. Early in infancy, the material substance of the human brain is put into communication via the pineal gland with the separate substance of the mind: res extensa (extended stuff) is joined by res cogitans (thinking stuff). The consciousness that results lays the foundation for the soul.
Today, we may think such ‘substance dualism’ laughable. A century and a half after Descartes, the great French essayist Denis Diderot was certainly laughing. ‘A tolerably clever man,’ he wrote in 1780, ‘began his book with these words: “Man … is composed of two distinct substances, the soul and the body.” … I nearly shut the book. Oh! ridiculous writer … you do not know what it is that you call soul, less still how they are united.’
Yet, by around 1838, Charles Darwin had apparently not seen the joke. ‘The soul,’ he wrote in one of his youthful scientific notebooks, ‘by the consent of all is superadded, animals not got it.’
Should we laugh? Or should we as contemporary scientists show some understanding? As I see it, it is not as clear-cut as many of us would like to believe. To the contrary, anyone who looks objectively at the natural history of human beings might well conclude that Descartes and the young Darwin were pretty much on target. Anthropology, psychology, religion, philosophy, art, all suggest that the possession of a soul – founded on consciousness – is part and parcel of being human. Perhaps it was Diderot who was being ridiculous.
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