One of Us – Lapham’s Quarterly.
In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin made the intriguing claim that among the naturalists he knew it was consistently the case that the better a researcher got to know a certain species, the more each individual animal’s actions appeared attributable to “reason and the less to unlearnt instinct.” The more you knew, the more you suspected that they were rational. That marks an important pivot, that thought, insofar as it took place in the mind of someone devoted to extremely close and meticulous study of living animals, a mind that had trained itself not to sentimentalize. Even at so intimate a range of scrutiny, looking not just at apes and dogs but also at birds and worms, Darwin rediscovered that feeling, which even children know. Or which children believe, as a mechanist might say.