We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

—HENRY BESTON, The Outermost House

Presumption is our natural and original disease. The most wretched and frail of all creatures is man, and withal the proudest. He feels and sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, trapped worse than bird or fish, and yet in his imagination he places himself above the circle of the moon, bringing heaven under his feet.

By the vanity of the same imagination be equals himself to God, attributes to himself divine faculties, and withdraws and separates himself from all other creatures; he allots to these, his fellows and companions, the portion of faculties and power which he himself thinks fit.

How does he know, by the strength of his understanding, the secret and internal motions of animals, and from what comparison between them and us does he conclude the stupidity he attributes to them?

—MONTAIGNE, The Defense of Raymond Sebond

The only real revolutionary stance is that “nature” is the greatest convention of all. Perhaps there are no natures, no essences—only categories and paradigms that human beings mentally and politically impose on the flux of experience in order to produce illusions of certainty, definiteness, distinction, hierarchy. Apparently, human beings do not like a Heraclitan world; they want fixed points of reference in order not to fall into vertigo, nausea. Perhaps the idea of nature or essence is man’s ultimate grasp for eternity. The full impact of the theory of evolution (the mutability of species—including man) is thus still to come.

—JOHN RODMAN, The Dolphin Papers