74 • Alternatives to Animal Use in Research, Testing, and Education 
can stand in the way of man making the experi- 
ment, yet so that even in the quest of science he 
be mindful of mercy. 
Protestantism retains the thesis that humans en- 
joy a rightful hegemony over other animals, but 
suggests a shift towards a “stewardship” interpre- 
tation of that role. John Calvin, the 16th-century 
Reformation theologian, maintained that when 
God placed animals “in subjection unto us, He did 
it with the condition that we should treat them 
gently” (13). They were brute beasts, to be sure, 
but for Calvin as for Augustine they were also crea- 
tures of God. Calvin went a step further, however, 
in making this fact about animals a limitation on 
humans' use of them. Here humans would seem 
to be less the sovereigns of nature than deputies 
appointed to manage God's earthly estate. Every 
creature would still be subject to God’s ownership 
and control. A person was still worth more than 
any number of sparrows, yet “no one of them will 
fall to the ground without your Father’s will” (Mat- 
thew 10:29). Thus, Karl Barth, a leading modern 
Protestant theologian, urged that people possess 
the right to use and sometimes to kill animals, but 
only because God has so authorized it in order that 
humans might live (9). 
There have been a few distinguished Judeo-Chris- 
tian defenders of a position much closer to the 
Oriental view . Saint Francis and Albert Schweitzer 
both pressed for a principle of reverence toward 
every living thing. But their ideal has been received 
as just that: a norm perhaps for saints, and some- 
thing all should desire, but not binding on imper- 
fect individuals in less-than-ideal circumstances. 
In the absence of mainstream philosophical sup- 
port, the intellectual authority of the reverence - 
for-all-life rule is thought to be outweighed by the 
personal prestige of its practitioners (21). 
Until 1600, the philosophical mainstream was 
Aristotelian. Using a much broader conception of 
the soul than the current one, Aristotle distin- 
guished living from nonliving beings by the pres- 
ence or absence of some form of a soul, or life- 
giving power. Its function might be nutrition, 
sensation, desire, locomotion, or thought. The first 
of these, but not the rest, was found in plants. All 
animals had sensation and desire as well, and most 
also had locomotion. Humans alone had the power 
of thought (4). This advantage made humans nat- 
urally suited to rule over other living beings and 
made animals natural slaves. Aristotle reached this 
conclusion by generalizing from phenomena al- 
ready at work within humans : Those with greater 
rationality exhibited an internal mastery of rea- 
son over desire and an external mastery over those 
who, because they lacked the mental equipment 
to tend to more than their bodily needs, required 
direction from others (5). This resulted in leader- 
ship by those most competent to rule. 
Natural fitness implied that nature worked toward 
certain ends that together formed a master plan. 
The significance of the 17th-century scientific rev- 
olution lay not so much in its overthrow of church 
authority in the empirical realm as in its discov- 
ery of a method and a subject matter (i.e., mechan- 
ics treated as a branch of physics) that dispensed 
with the hypothesis that nature had purposes . Na- 
ture became simply the sum of matter in motion, 
mathematically describable without reference to 
goals that phenomena might serve. 
The philosophical foundations for the new world 
view were supplied by Rene Descartes, who rec- 
ognized only two kinds of existence, material and 
mental. Bodies were extended in space and time 
and divisible into parts, with properties of size, 
shape, and weight. Minds contained beliefs, emo- 
tions, and intentions, but no physical properties. 
The human was a composite being— the only one— 
with both a body and a mind (18). 
Animals did not fit comfortably into the Carte- 
sian scheme. They obviously had bodies, but did 
they not also have sensations and desires? Des- 
cartes answered that in a sense they did, but that 
their behavior could be duplicated by a machine, 
while human behavior could not. In their use of 
language and thought, humans revealed a capac- 
ity to respond to stimuli in a variety of ways, 
whereas animals would respond in only one, “ac- 
cording to the arrangements of their organs” (19). 
For all their differences, the Aristotelian and 
Cartesian theories joined hands in making the activ- 
ities that required reasoning the distinctive mark 
of humanity. Both defined the human being as a 
rational animal. That thesis was not questioned 
until the following century, when British empiri- 
cists criticized it as inflated claims for the power 
of reason. The Scottish skeptic David Hume con- 
