Draft: appeared as ‘“Onely Proper Unto Man”: Dreaming and Being Human in the Renaissance’ in
Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night, Katherine Hodgkin, Michelle
O’Callaghan and S.J. Wiseman ed. (Routledge: New York), pp.31-44.
‘Onely Proper Unto Man’: Dreaming and Being Human
Erica Fudge
In his 1631 translation of Gulielmus Adolphus Scribonius’ work Rerum naturalium
doctrina methodica, Daniel Widdowes wrote, ‘All Creatures are reasonable, or
unreasonable. They which want reason, are Beasts, who live on Land or in Water.’1 This
perception of the absolute difference of human from animal comes from classical
sources and persists not only in the ways in which thinkers understood the place of
humanity in the early modern period, but also - albeit in more debated form - remains
important today. Man (and it usually was man) is the thinking being; this is where the
superiority of the species comes from.
The use of reason as the basis of the difference between the species had its
place in a variety of discourses: in discussions of language, salvation, legal obligation,
and so on.2 But the capacity of the human, the possessor of reason, to have access
beyond the immediate was central to many arguments. In 1612, for example, William
Jewel proposed that ‘reason abstracteth from visible things, things inuisible, from
corporeall incorporeall, things secret and mysticall from such as are plaine and triuiall,
and lastly things generall from things particular.’3 Such an assertion was
commonplace in the period, and the human’s access to the immaterial can logically be
traced in discussions of time itself: as the English Jesuit Thomas Wright noted in
1601,
1
Though men and beasts in many things differ, yet in one we may most
plainely distinguish them, for beasts regard only or principally what
concerneth the present time, but men forecast for future euents; they knowe
the meanes and the end, and therefore comparing these two together, they
prouide present meanes for a future intent.4
This assertion follows the belief that it is humans alone who have access to the realm
of the abstract. Animals live in the immediate present. They react only to what is
before them; they cannot think beyond the material. This was a point that was
reiterated by Miles Sandys, Member of Parliament for Cambridge University, who
wrote in 1634 that ‘Betweene man and beast this is a speciall difference, that a Beast,
onely as farre as hee is moved by sense, applyeth himselfe to that alone, which is
present, very little perceiving a thing past, or to come.’5
Humans, on the other hand, because they are reasonable, can move beyond the
immediate and can access what is no longer, or is not yet present - the past and the
future. The immateriality of absent time does not mean that humans cannot begin to
comprehend and use the past in order to plan for the future; it means that such
comprehension and use establishes humans as the reasonable beings that they are.
Such an ability to transcend the immediate and make use of the three temporal realms
- past, present, future - is being prudent; is enacting the first of the four cardinal
virtues. As Jewel states, ‘For, the remembrance of things past, to the Prudent man,
standeth in great steade concerning things present, and also makes him likewise to
foresee the things that are to come.’6
2
In this essay I want to look at another of the forms that, in early modern
thought, reason was understood to take: the dream. Like reason, dreaming deals with
the abstract (things that don’t exist) and, like prudence, it deals with time (the ability
to prophesy future events). An analysis of the writings surrounding dreaming, then,
provide a platform from which to review some of our assumptions about the status of
humanity in early modern thought, and to rethink what it was that made a human
human in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Pierre Le Loyer, whose work was summarized and translated into English in
1605, succinctly sets up the debate that the rest of this essay will be concerned with,
and it is worth quoting at some length from A Treatise of Specters:
there are two sortes of Imagination, namely, one Intellectuall, and without
corporall substance: The other sensible and corporall. The Intellectuall is the
Fantasie, of which is bred and engendred in vs a memory or remembrance (as the
Peripatetickes speake) and the discourse of the reasonable soule: I meane that
discourse which is proper only vnto man: by the which he ballanceth and
weigheth the things present, by those which are past, & foreseeth by things past,
those which are to come after. For albeit the vnreasonable creatures doe
sometimes seeme to haue a kind of discourse, or dreaming in them, (as is to be
seene in Horses and Dogges) yet this dreaming or discourse in them, is no other,
then meerely bestial and brutish: which doth not accomodate nor apply it selfe,
but onely to things present …7
Le Loyer, like Widdowes, Jewel, Wright and Sandys follows Aristotle and offers
uncompromising certainty. The notion of the absolute difference of humans and
3
animals that he presents closes down any possibility of animal rationality. Humans are
reasonable, and imaginative (one is inseparable from the other); animals, on the other
hand, are unreasonable, and have, therefore, merely bestial passions. They lack the
power to reason abstractly, to think beyond ‘things present’ and seem to dream. But to
truly dream is to imagine beyond the present and bring reason into play, and it is in
this way that the human ‘foreseeth by things past, those which are to come after’. By
implication, the dream, a product of reason, is a site of human superiority. Or, to put it
another way, Le Loyer implies that to dream truly is to be human, and, by extension,
to have no true dreams - not to have reason to exercise - is not human, or rather, is
non-human.
The opposition of reason to unreason, and human to animal would seem to be
accepted as truth in much early modern writing. However, despite the commonplace
repetition of this opposition it is possible to trace significant problems within it. In a
number of works that deal with dreams in early modern England the line that divides
human from animal is not so clear. Where the Middle Ages had seen in part a
glorification of certain animals - Saint Guinefort, the grey hound saint being one
example, as were Francis of Assisi’s ‘sister birds’, and ‘friar wolf’ - the early modern
period saw the firm establishment of certain epistemological boundaries.8 However,
despite these changes, rather than simply clarifying human status, as Pierre Le Loyer
argued, the study of the dream in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in
fact, creates numerous paradoxes that serve to threaten the representation of humanity
as a distinct and separate species. When ideas about the human dream are placed
alongside writings dealing with animals what can be traced is a twofold problem:
humans become animals, and animals exhibit traits that might otherwise be considered
human. I will be arguing that human status is not simply present in the dream, rather,
4
that it is fragile in the face of the brutal imagination. In writings about dreams in early
modern England we can trace the desire for the separation of human from animal, but
we can also see how these dreams of human stability themselves turn into nightmares.
The nightmare, in fact, is a good place to start to look at the problems concerning
human status faced by early modern writers, as it serves as a useful reminder to
modern readers that the oppositions that we sometimes take for granted - reason and
unreason; human and animal - may not be such antitheses after all.
Nightmare Visions
In his 1620 call for a new science Francis Bacon set up an opposition between
scientific truth and popular myth, between considered-counsel and gossip, and the
distinctive nature of these modes of learning persists in many areas of early modern
culture.9 But, as with the opposition human and animal, these other couples need to be
rethought. The contested meaning of the nightmare replicates the broader cultural
struggle between myth and ‘truth’ in the emergence of the new science, and presents
an apparently very different picture of the perception of fantasy. However, far from
being in complete opposition, the two schools of thought about the nightmare agree on
one significant point: the nightmare compromises the status of humanity.
According to what can be broadly termed the ‘mythical’ interpretation, the
nightmare is an old hag who sits upon the chest of the sleeper, leaving him/her
struggling for breath. Interpreted this way this fantasy of the night is not a product of
the sleeper’s unconscious, but an external force: a monster who enters the
bedchamber. In Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, for example, Mistress Quickly understands
this when she threatens Falstaff that, unless he repays the money he owes her, she will
5
‘ride thee a-nights like the mare.’10 The person who experiences a nightmare is (if
only temporarily) possessed. The etymological link between mare - female witch - and
mare - female horse - is based only on gender, and has no implications for the nature
of the horse. The mare of the nightmare is not a horse out of its normal field, rather
she is a supernatural monster, absolutely in her element. But there are ways in which
supernatural and natural, nightmare and horse are linked, and what lies at the heart of
the connection is the question of species difference.
Writing in 1594 Thomas Nashe proposed that night is ‘the nurse of cares, the
mother of despaire, the daughter of hell’. 11 For Thomas Browne, night also stands in
stark contrast to day, and the extension of the difference between the two is found, of
course, in the opposition of reason and unreason. His short undated work, Of Dreams,
begins:
Half our dayes wee passe in the shadowe of the earth, and the brother of death
exacteth a third part of our lives. A good part of our sleepes is peeced out with
visions, and phantasticall objects wherin wee are confessedly deceaved. The
day supplyeth us with truths, the night with fictions and falshoods, which
unconfortably divide the natural account of our beings. And therefore having
passed the day in sober labours and rationall enquiries of truth, wee are fayne
to betake ourselves unto such a state of being, wherin the soberest heads have
acted all the monstrosities of melancholy, and which unto open eyes are no
better then folly and madnesse.12
6
It is when the light of the day has been replaced by the darkness of the night that the
human, that light of the natural world, finds itself undone. It is in sleep – the brother
of death – that the rational finds its other: the mad, the irrational.
Such an opposition is common in the early modern period – Hamlet, of course,
made the link between sleep and death, and also saw dreams as the disturbers of
tranquility (‘there’s the rub’). However, I want to suggest that it is outside of the realm
of the literary, and even the essay, that we can trace a key understanding of the
dangers of sleep in the early modern period. It is, rather, by turning to horse-training
manuals – texts whose aim is not so much to entertain as to aid humans in their
expression of absolute rule over brute creation - that we can begin to unearth the fears
inherent in being human.
In The Perfection of Horse-manship (1609), Nicholas Morgan noted that after
the Fall man ‘lost al obedience, which by original creation was subiect vnto him, & ...
now the obedience of all creatures must be attained by Arte, and this same preserued
in vigor by vse and practise’.13 Horse riding, he argues, is an emblem of human
dominion that replicates that which was held by Adam before the exit from Eden. To
ride a horse is to return to a perfect natural order. As such, horse riding images the
control of the human, the obedience of the animal, and - in more literal terms - man on
top. In nightmares, however, the entry of the supernatural inverts this order, for here
the human is ridden. The mythical understanding of the nightmare presents a picture
of humanity made animal; dominion is overturned.
This equination of humanity has a significant, if contextually different,
contemporary parallel that highlights the implication of the mythical nightmare. In Sir
Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1582) Astrophil is overcome by love, his passion
overthrows his reason, and the image Sidney invokes is of horse riding: ‘by strange
7
work I prove / A horseman to my horse, a horse to love’ (Sonnet 49, ll. 2-3).14 This
image of the humanist courtier reduced, by a woman, to the status of the unthinking
animal echoes the story of Aristotle and Phyllis in which the dangers of desire are
illustrated when Phyllis - the object of Aristotle’s desire - has Aristotle carry her upon
his back. As Jeanne Addison Roberts has noted, Hans Baldung Grien’s woodcut of
Aristotle and Phyllis of 1513 was ‘much copied’ in the early modern period: ‘English
Renaissance artists’, she writes, ‘quickly domesticated this portrait of the evils of
female insubordination.’15 The great philosopher is reduced by his baser instincts to
the status of an animal, and the image is of the loss of reason: he becomes like a horse.
A similar interpretation can be placed upon the mythical version of the nightmare,
where ideas not only about demons, but also about humanity, rationality, and
animality can be traced. And because salvation is tied up with reason, because the
conscience is linked with self-consciousness, the nightmare is more powerful than any
mere woman can ever be. In this mythical interpretation the nightmare brings with her
both intellectual and spiritual degradation.
The second interpretation of the nightmare available in the early modern
period, which can broadly be termed medical (as opposed to mythic), emerged first of
all, as Steven F. Kruger has shown, in the twelfth century, and developed out of the
reappearance of Aristotle, and the new understanding of the body.16 This very
different understanding of nighttime terrors was taken up by thinkers in the early
modern period. Writing in 1607, Thomas Walkington, for example, finds a natural, as
opposed to supernatural, reason for the existence of the nightmare. He writes, ‘if a
man lye hot, as vpon feathers, which greatly impaires mans strength, & affects him
with a vitious kinde of soaking heate; it is also the meanes to bring the … nightmare.’17 Thomas Nashe agrees, writing ‘If wee bee troubled with too manie clothes,
8
then we suppose the night mare rides vs.’18 A similarly medical interpretation was
given once again by James Hart in 1633: ‘To lie upon the backe is yet worst of all
other, and furthereth the Apoplexie, Epilepsie, Vertigo, or giddinesse, Incubus, or
nightmare, and the like.’19 Likewise, Widdowes argued that ‘this affection commeth
when the vitall spirits in the braine are darkened by vapours, ascending from
melancholy and phlegme, insomuch, that that facultie being oppressed, some heavie
thing seemeth to bee layd upon us.’20 In three of these explanations the mythical
interpretation is present - ‘the night mare rides us’, ‘Incubus’, ‘some heavie thing
seemeth to bee layd upon us’ - but is given a medical explanation; the nightmare is
produced by natural means. It is the body itself that produces the terrors.
While this medical understanding refuses the possibility of the nightmare as an
external demon, it also, however - like the mythical interpretation it is challenging undercuts the status of humanity. For a start, reason is revealed to be bodily; that is,
physical change affects the rational capacity. As well as this embodying of humanity,
in the ‘medical’ interpretation, it is not only humans who experience nightmares, and
the trans-specific nature of the nightmare attests once again to the collapse of the
boundary which writers have attempted to erect between human and animal. This time
as well as the equination of humanity, we see the humanization of the horse. As David
Clark has argued, these two ideas are not separate, one is the (inevitable) ‘tropological
reversal’ of the other.21
In his horse-training manual, Cavelarice (1607), Gervase Markham writes ‘Of
the witch or night-mare’, ‘This disease hapneth ofte vnto horses, and foolish smiths
thinke such horses are ridden with the witch and that the disease is supernatural’.22
Like Nashe, he records the mythical understanding of the nightmare, but only in order
to mock it. Markham goes on: ‘to speake the truth of the disease indeede, though some
9
hold there is no such infirmitie, yet I know by experience it is otherwise, for cruditie
and raw digestion stoppeth the powers of the body and makes the horse for want of
breath in his sleepe to struggle and striue most violently’.23 Using the empirical power
of experience, Markham’s interpretation of the horse’s nightmare replicates
Walkington’s interpretation of the human nightmare. For both it is the product of the
body.
Animals and humans, according to this interpretation, share the same
nightmares. And here the body is simultaneously meaningful and utterly destructive of
all meaning: it is the source of the nightmare and it is the place where difference is
destroyed. This removal of apparent proofs of difference is an inevitable and
paradoxical product of the turn against myth. Where Bacon asserted that the new
science would - theoretically - return humanity to its original state,24 the practice of
empiricism, here figured in Markham’s experience of the horse’s nightmare, collapses
the boundary between the species. If the nightmare is produced internally, by the body,
then the mind, that which experiences the nightmare, is reliant on its physical shell for
its capacity. As such, if humans and animals share basically the same bodies - a fact
which numerous animal experimenters, like Harvey and even Descartes, assented to
without problem - then it is difficult to see where the human mind might differ from
the animal (and for Descartes, of course, the pineal gland is always a deferred
presence). The terrors of the night bring with them terrors about human status.
This sense of the fragility of humanity that is contained in writings about the
nightmare would appear to be corrected in contemporary writings about dreams. But
again, a close analysis makes such a claim problematic. Different types of dream are
delineated which have, in part, the effect of making the difference between the species
10
appear to be clearer. But this is not their only effect, and once again human status is
threatened by that which appears to make it stronger.
The Property of Humanity
Thomas Hill’s Moste Pleasaunte Arte of the Interpretation of Dreames (1576) is the
fullest examination of the meaning and power of dreams in the early modern period,25
and in it Hill distinguishes two different kinds of dreams: vain and true.26 Vain
dreams, he argues, are ‘no true signifiers of matters to come but rather shewers of the
present affections and desiers of the body.’ True dreams, on the other hand, ‘do signifie
matters to come’. The distinction here is between dreams which are experienced by
those ‘ouercharged with the burthe[n] of meate or drinckes, or superfluous humors’, and
those ‘seene by graue & sober persons’; between those dictated by the body’s excesses,
and those by the mind whose bodily shell is in abeyance: and the impact of the dream
reflects this difference.27 A vain dream - caused as it is by indigestion - is merely
reactive; it relies on the existence of the material. A true dream, on the other hand, is
prophetic; it can envision that most intangible thing of all, the future.
Writing thirty-one years after Hill, Thomas Walkington made a further
distinction within Hill’s categorisation of dreams. Agreeing with him about the
significance of the true dream, Walkington argues that a vain dream is ‘whe[n] a man
imagins hee doth such things in his sleepe, which he did the day before: the species
being strongly fixed in his phantasie’. This is different from what he terms the ‘dreame
Naturall’ which ‘ariseth from our complections, when humours beene too aboundant in
a wight, as if one bee cholericke of complections’.28 His distinction is between vain
dreams that are products of the mind, and vain dreams which are products of the body:
that is, between Aristotle’s idea that dreams are nothing more than ‘Sense-impressions
11
[that] leave remnants in the sense-organs, which continue to be experienced after the
original perceptions have gone’,29 and the concept of the dream that emerges in
humoural psychology. Walkington’s categories upset the connection that Hill had made
between the true dream and the mind, and the vain dream and the body, in that here the
vain dream can also be a product of the source of reason.
These different categories of dreams are not only important in their complication
of the established mind/body dualism, however. They are also significant when dreams
are used as the springboard into a debate about human status in the early modern period,
because the difference between a vain and a true dream is used to define human status.
Turning first to the most obvious link between the species, the vain dream - the dream
that is the result of indigestion, the balance of the humours, or the remnants of the day’s
events - is shared with the beast. Robert Burton, for example, saw the lack of reason in
animals as being replicated in humans: ‘As a dogge dreames of an hare, so doe men,
on such subiects, they thought on last.’30 The appearance in dreams of the day’s
residue reveals that beastliness is not confined to the beasts.
This problematic link between human and animal is made clear later in the
seventeenth century when Sir Thomas Browne, following the custom, wrote of the
existence of two different types of dream. The terms Browne uses, however, are
different from Hill’s and Walkington’s, and are particularly interesting in the context of
this essay. Instead of true and vain, Browne has divine and animal dreams. The
distinctive qualities of the dream become explicit. A divine dream is ‘Angelicall’; it
reveals the presence of God and the possibility of abstraction in humanity and is a
fulfillment of Browne’s argument in Religio Medici that ‘There is surely a peece of
Divinity in us’.31 The animal dream, ‘wherin the thoughts or actions of the day are acted
12
over and ecchoed in the night’, on the other hand, represents the presence of the base,
the bestial.32
So it would seem that because, as Laurent Joubert wrote with confidence,
‘animals evidently dream’,33 we need to take seriously the distinctions between the
different sorts of dreams, relegate the animal dream to the class of ‘vain’, and turn to the
true dream to find the true human. In his definition of true dreams - he actually terms
them ‘fatall dreames’ - Thomas Walkington writes that they are ‘as it were, prophets to
presage and foretell euents’.34 They are related to the solely human capacity for abstract
reason, because through them the dreamer experiences what is truly abstract; that is,
what is yet to come. An animal, on the other hand, as Le Loyer noted, ‘doth not
accomodate nor apply it selfe, but onely to things present’.35 As Artemidorus, the
second-century writer, and father of dream-divination, wrote (as translated in the 1606
edition of The Iudgement, or exposition of Dreames):
what is ther more honest, more holy, & that comes neerer to Diuinitie, then
that a humane spirit may support, know, and vnderstand a part of future things
without offending God, only by the meanes of auses & significations
præcede[n]t, which are sent to vs by him, which is onely proper to man, who
hath alone the vse of reason, whereby he may discerne, and iudge of things to
come.36
This emphasis on the prophetic power of the true dream is underlined in the early
modern period by the attribution of a text to Aristotle which is now thought to be by
Theophrastus, a follower of Aristotle. As Jennifer Radden has noted, this attribution
of Problemata XXX, 1 ‘to Aristotle in part accounts for its enormous influence’.37
13
Problemata XXX, 1 claimed that the melancholic was a superman, the creature most
in touch with the divine whose proximity to divinity had a specific form: as Winfried
Schleiner has noted, melancholics are ‘characterized by their orientation towards the
future’; that is, they experience prophetic dreams and are, as such, truly human.38
However, alongside this version of the prophetic dream, there exists another one, to be
found in Aristotle’s De divinatione per somnum. Here Aristotle argues that divination
in dreams cannot be dismissed ‘with contempt’, nor can it be given ‘implicit
confidence’. Noting that because ‘merely commonplace persons’ can be said to
experience prophetic dreams, he declares that they must be seen as either causes or
tokens of events, never truly prophetic. That is, that ‘the movements set up in sleep
should also prove to be the starting-points of actions to be performed in the
daytime’.39 In his reading, prophetic dreams are merely repetitions of ideas that are
already in the imagination, and the notion of prophesy merely hides the prior
conceptualisation of those ideas. Alternatively, Aristotle argues that so-called
prophetic dreams are probably nothing more than coincidences: ‘it is natural that the
fact should stand as it does whenever a person, on mentioning something, finds the
very thing mentioned come to pass.’ He goes on, ‘On the whole, forasmuch as certain
of the lower animals also dream, it may be concluded that dreams are not sent by God,
nor are they designed [to reveal the future].’40 In this sense, the idea of the prophetic
dream is, instead, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Perhaps the confusion over the Aristotelian canon is to be read alongside the
confusion over the status of humanity within the dream-texts. Problemata XXX,1 is
maintained in part as a true authority because it offers an image of human potential
that is missing in other places, and it allows for certain distinctions between the
species to be made. So, when, for example, in his 1607 Historie of Foure-Footed
14
Beastes, Edward Topsell noted that dogs ‘sleepe as doth a man, and therein dreame
verie often, as may appeare by their often barking in their sleepe’, he was not
attempting to make problematic the boundary which existed between human and animal,
rather he was relying on an understanding of the different sorts of dreams referred to
here.41 A dog’s dream, it would seem, is never the same as a human’s dream, because a
dog can never experience a true dream. Aristotle noted in De Somno, ‘all animals
partake of sleep’,42 what dream-diviners, and proto-zoologists like Topsell add to this is
that not all animals truly dream. In fact, the only creature who does is the human.
Deferring the Human
But, of course, if human status is to be sought in the true dream, then humanity
becomes a deferred rather than present subject. A true dream, after all, can only be
proved to be true after the dream, not in it. It is only in the occurrence of the foreseen
event that the truth of the dream can be asserted. In this sense the claim to be human is
itself a self-fulfilling prophecy: the human is always the effect that looks for its own
cause. In his Philomythie or Philomythologie wherin Outlandish Birds, Beasts, and
Fishes, are Taught to Speak true English plainely (1616), Thomas Scot looked at
contemporary developments in philosophy - at Paracelsus and Copernicus - and asked
‘How apt is Man to erre?’ One of the errors he noted was that in human understanding
‘Causes forgoe effects by cause of kinde, / Yet first th’effect and then the cause we
find.’ For Scot this recognition led to writing about political upheaval - ‘No wonder
that the Clergy would be kings, / Kings Church-men; Lords and ladies equal things’ but here we might see the issue of the reversal of reality as referring, in fact, to human
status.43 The human, in a sense, is a product of historiography; is always read
backwards. Nietzsche argued that human existence is ‘an imperfect tense that never
15
becomes a present’, and we can find a similar idea in the early modern understanding
of the place of the prophetic dream.44
The other question raised by the true dream, and its role in distinguishing
between human and animal in early modern thought, is that the assertion of human
presence in the true is one that raises questions about our access to truth. Put simply,
how do we know that animals do not prophesy in their dreams? If there is a debate
about the possibility of human prophesy in dreams (as the two Aristotle’s show) then
it might not be unthinkable to suggest the logical possibility of an animal experiencing
a true dream. Animals, we know, cannot tell us what they have dreamt, so it is always
a human interpretation that claims an animal does not dream truly; a human
interpretation that may not - when it comes to the question of human status - be
wholly objective. Again, we can turn to Nietzsche here:
If somebody hides a thing behind a bush, seeks it again and finds it in the selfsame place, then there is not much to boast of, respecting this seeking and
finding; thus, however, matters stand with the seeking and finding of ‘truth’
within the realm of reason.45
I am slightly altering the sense of Nietzsche by taking his ‘realm of reason’ to be the
literal realm of the human mind, as well as the discursive realm of morality, but the
idea that he presents is, I think, traceable in early modern texts. Emerging from the
sceptical tradition, writers including Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Charron
presented humans not as the all-conquering masters of nature that were proposed (in
different, but sometimes overlapping ways) by the Christian and Aristotelian
traditions, but as constructors of their own so-called superiority.46 Montaigne wrote,
16
‘we do not place ourselves above other animals and reject their condition and
companionship by right reason but out of stubbornness and insane arrogance.’ Human
reason ‘clothes everything in its own condition.’ It is able to see the world only
through its own eyes, and this latter point leads Montaigne to a discussion, almost
inevitably it might now seem, of animals’ dreams: ‘a war-horse accustomed to
trumpet, harquebus and combat can be seen twitching and trembling as though in the
thick of battle: clearly its mind is conceiving a drum without drum-beats, an army
without arms, without physical body.’47 The last phrase is the crucial one here: it
stands against the Aristotelian assumption that only humans have access to the realm
of the imaginary, to a world that does not exist in reality.
Montaigne’s friend and compatriot Charron followed this line of thinking,
writing:
It is an opinion amongst vs, that there are but fiue senses of Nature, because
wee marke but fiue in vs; but yet there may well be more, and it is greatly to
be doubted that there are; but it is impossible for vs to know them, to affirme
them, or to denie them, because a man shall neuer know the want of that
sense which he hath neuer had.
He goes on, a few pages later, to impress upon his reader the effect of this doubt:
‘From the weaknesse and incertitude of our senses comes ignorance, errour and
mistakings: for sithens that by their meanes and mixture we attaine to all knowledge,
if they deceiue vs in their report, we haue no other helpe to sticke unto.’48 Like
Montaigne, Charron sees animals as the victims of this human blindness. If a
17
comparison of humans with animals is required, who, Charron asks, shall make this
comparison? ‘Shall man? He is a partie and to be suspected.’49
It is not only in French thought that such questions about absolute human
power were being raised in the early modern period. In England too the status of
humanity was under scrutiny. In The Sceptick (c.1590) a text that was attributed to Sir
Walter Raleigh when it was first published in 1651, the author asks, ‘why should I
presume to prefer my conceit and imagination in affirming that a thing is thus and thus
in its own nature, because it seemeth to me to be so, before the conceit of other living
creatures, who may as well think it to be otherwise in its own nature, because it
appeareth otherwise to them than it doth to me?’ ‘why then should I condemn
[animals’] conceit and fantasy concerning any thing more than they may mine?’50 The
author offers no clear answers to these questions; he is a sceptic and, as Jonathan
Barnes has noted, ‘The Sceptical investigator neither asserts nor denies, neither
believes nor disbelieves.’51 The questions are asked to mark out the limits of human
reason; to indicate the ways in which what is claimed for human understanding goes
beyond what is provable and moves into the realms of arrogance, self-deceit, and, we
might add, anthropocentrism.
The point that follows the second question asked by the author of The Sceptick
- ‘why then should I condemn [animals’] conceit and fantasy concerning any thing
more than they may mine?’ - is as close as he is able to get to an answer: ‘They may
be in the truth and I in error, as well as I in the truth and they err.’ It is a hypothetical
situation to which no conclusion is offered, and the lack of conclusion leads to an
undermining of human status and a repetition of the source text of early modern
scepticism, Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Scepticism:
18
If my conceit must be believed before theirs, great reason that it be proved to
be truer than theirs. And this proof must be either by demonstration or without
it. Without it none will believe, certainly. If by demonstration, then this
demonstration must seem to be true, or not seem to be true. If it seem not to
be true, it is easily rejected. If it seem to be true, then will it be a question
whether it be so indeed as it seemeth to be. And to allege that for a certain
proof which is uncertain and questionable seemeth absurd.52
How can we prove human pre-eminence? In a sense, this question had not been asked
within Aristotelian ideas. There the assertion of the a priori existence of the rational
soul was taken as proof enough.
In the context of such ideas it is unsurprising that early modern thinkers turned
to the role of the true dream to establish the true human. The dream, in fact, reveals
the modes through which animals are simultaneously written into and written out of
the realm of ideas. It is only in human understanding (all that we have) that animals do
not prophesy in their dreams. As Owen Feltham - a man who was certainly not a
sceptic - wrote in 1628: ‘So in Beasts, in Birds, in Dreames, and all viary Omens, they
are onely the guessive interpretations of dim-ey’d Man: full of doubt, full of deceit.’53
Like the animal, the dream is never truly knowable, and, by implication, we can never
know whether an animal has true dreams, we can only guess, but that guess is often
presented as fact, as establishing with authority the status of the human.
Dreaming with beasts
In The Iudgement, or exposition of Dreames, Artemidorus presents, under the heading
‘Of beasts of all sorts’, the meanings of animals in dreams, and in his definition we
19
can trace one idea about animals that epitomises the attitudes found in some of the
more general debates of the period. Artemidorus goes through various animals
outlining their meaning as they appear in dreams: a sheep, for example, signifies
advancement ‘wherefore it is good to dreame you haue many of the[m], or see them of
others and feed them’; an ass signifies a wise companion; ‘To see a gentle, familiar
and fawning Lyon, signifyes good, and profit’, and so on. He then goes on to note that
in dreams animals ‘signifie exceeding profit if they speake our la[n]guage, especially
if they say any good thing or joyfull; and all which they speake commonly falls out.’54
For Artemidorus the speaking animal is a vision of the ideal.
The dream of speaking with, and understanding animals is a persistent one.
But in the early modern period it had specific religious connotations. In 1544 in
Antwerp, a chronicler wrote of one David Joris, that he was ‘a new, false and heretical
prophet ... [who] regarded himself to be the new God who led the simple folk to
believe that he could speak with all tongues to the wild beasts and birds’. As Gary
Waite has noted, this ability signifies ‘a restoration of Adam’s ability to communicate
with animals.’55 It is, like horse-riding, a return to a perfect original harmony: a return
to a lost golden age in which humans and beasts could converse.
But, on another level, the speaking animal in a dream signifies that the dream
is a true dream; if the animal speaks, Artemidorus writes, it is commonly prophetic,
and knowing this gives a kind of present quality to the human. The animal, in this
sense, creates the human status of the dreamer: the human becomes truly human at the
moment the animal speaks and it can be understood, because what an animal says
‘commonly’ comes true. The prophecy is no longer a postponement of status; it is, like
a scriptural prophecy, always-already true. But the irony is, of course, that the dream’s
speaking animal is also a prophetic animal; that is, in proving human status it also
20
proves its own status as not non-human, or, to get rid of the untidy double negative, by
prophesying, the dream-animal proves its own status as human.
The ‘exceeding profit’ due to the dreamer who understands the animal that
Artemidorus refers to is the profit of the dreamer - new riches, a good marriage, a
successful business venture. But it is also the antithesis of this kind of power. The
profit that may come from the dream, the new knowledge that emerges when an
animal speaks, compromises any notion of human separation and power, as when an
animal speaks it simultaneously reveals human status, and that it is no different from
you. This may be in fantasy - the true dream is never a representation of the real world
- but it is a fantasy that, like the status of humanity itself, has a kind of ambivalent
relation to reality. Hear an animal speak, and it can prove your dream is true, and thus
prove you to be truly human; but acknowledge, even in fantasy, that an animal can
have prophetic powers, and it can disprove your ideal of humanity. The dream, as the
property of the human, paradoxically both creates and dismembers that human. What
emerges is a being caught between dream and reality, between human and animal.
Perhaps it is this that is what is ‘onely proper unto man’ after all.
1
Daniel Widdowes, Natvrall Philosophy: Or A Description of the World, and of the
severall Creatures therein contained, second edition, London, 1631, p. 64.
2
See, R.W. Serjeantson, ‘The Passions and Animal Language’, Journal of the History
of Ideas 62 (2001): 425-444; Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in
Early Modern English Culture, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, esp. pp. 34-63, 115142.
21
3
William Jewel, The Golden Cabinet of true Treasure: Containing the summe of
Morall Philosophie, London, 1612, p. 55.
4
[Thomas Wright], The Passions of the Minde, London, 1601, p. 312. On this issue,
see Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early
Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), especially 7-38.
5
Sir Miles Sandys, Prudence, The first of the Foure Cardinall Virtues, London, 1634,
p. 72.
6
Jewel, Golden Cabinet, pp. 33-4.
7
[Pierre Le Loyer], A Treatise of Specters or straunge Sights, Visions and Apparitions
appearing sensibly vnto men, London, 1605, sig. Bv.
8
See Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, healer of children since
the thirteenth century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; and The Little
Flowers of Saint Francis, 1373, reprinted London: Dent, 1963, pp. 29, 38-40. Joyce E.
Salisbury has argued that the law of 1534 that made bestiality a capital offence marked
a change in attitude: ‘As the lines between the species seemed to blur, legislation
against bestiality increased in an attempt to create more clear boundaries between
human and animal when popular imagination was losing track of such barriers.’
Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, London and New York:
Routledge, 1994, p. 96.
9
See Aphorism 98 in Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), transl. and ed. Peter
Urback and John Gibson, Chicago: Open Court, 1994, pp. 107-8. As Lorraine Daston
and Katherine Park have reminded us, however, the simple chronological and
‘progressive’ order – from myth to science – is a problematic one, and over simplifies
the ways in which, as they note in their study of wonders, the shift in intellectual
22
concepts operates. They write of a story that is ‘indulatory, continuous, sometimes
cyclical.’ Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750, New York:
Zone Books, 1998, p. 17.
10
William Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV 2.1.78, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds)
The Complete Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. This passage was
brought to my attention in Jeanne Addison Roberts’ The Shakespearean Wild:
Geography, Genus and Gender, 1991, repr. Lincoln, Nebraska and London: Bison
Books, 1994, pp. 107-8.
11
Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the night. Or, A Discourse of Apparitions, London,
1594, sig. B1v.
12
Sir Thomas Browne, On Dreams (n.d.), in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works,
C. A. Patrides (ed), London: Penguin, 1977, p. 475. The link between dreams and
fiction was one that was made in the Middle Ages. See Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in
the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, especially p. 133.
13
Nicholas Morgan, The Perfection of Horse-manship, London, 1609, p. 2.
14
Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella (1582), in Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Poems
(ed) Katherine Duncan-Jones, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 141.
15
Roberts, Shakespearean Wild, p. 64.
16
See Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages, p. 119.
17
T.W. [Thomas Walkington], The Optick Glasse of Humors, London, 1607, sig. 29v.
18
Nashe, Terrors, sig. C4r.
19
James Hart, L, Or The Diet of the Diseased, London, 1633, p. 334.
20
Widdowes, Natvrall Philosophy, p. 53.
23
21
David Clark, ‘On Being “The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany”: Dwelling with
Animals after Levinas’, in Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (eds) Animal Acts:
Configuring the Human in Western History, London and New York: Routledge, 1997,
p. 168.
22
Gervase Markham, Cavelarice, Or the English Horseman, London, 1607, Book II,
p. 29.
23
Ibid, p. 30.
24
See Fudge, Perceiving Animals, pp. 101-5.
25
A useful summary of dream-texts in the early modern period which also highlights
the significance of Hill’s work is Peter Holland, ‘“The Interpretation of Dreams” in
the Renaissance’, in Peter Brown (ed) Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams
from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 125-46.
26
Hill’s categorization comes out of late antique works by writers including
Macrobius and Calcidius. See Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages, passim.
27
Thomas Hill, The Moste pleasaunte Arte of the Interpretacion of Dreame, London,
1576, Epistle Dedicatory, n.p.
28
Walkington, Optick Glasse, sigs. 73v-74r, 76r, 76v.
29
Aristotle, De Insomniis, in Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams David Gallop (ed),
Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1996, 459a23-28, p. 89. Freud, of course, regarded the
left-overs of the day, what he termed ‘the day’s residues’, as having a role to play: he
argued that ‘the day’s residues are only a portion of the latent dream-thought.’ What is
important is that for Freud they were a portion of, not something totally separate from,
the ‘meaningful’ aspect of the dream. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis, transl. James Strachey, London: Penguin, 1974 , p. 264.
24
30
Democritvs Iunior [Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, 1624,
Part.2.Sect.2.Memb.5.
31
Browne, On Dreams, p. 475; Religio Medici (1643), in Sir Thomas Browne, p. 153.
32
Browne, On Dreams, p. 476.
33
Laurent Joubert, Traité du Ris (1579), translated by Gregory David De Rocher,
Treatise on Laughter, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980, p. 118.
34
Walkington, Optick Glasse, sig. 74r.
35
Le Loyer, Treatise, sig. Bv. Italics added.
36
Artemidorus, The Iudgement, or exposition of Dreames, Written by Artimodorus, an
Auntient and famous Author, first in Greeke, then Translated into Latin, After into
French, and now into English, London, 1606, The Epistle Dedicatory, n.p.
37
Jennifer Radden (ed) The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 55. She reproduces the text of Problemata XXX, 1
on pp. 57-60. On this Aristotelian text see also Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky
and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy,
Religion and Art, London: Thomas Nelson, 1964 , pp. 15-41.
38
Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius and Utopia in the Renaissance,
Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991, p.26.
39
Aristotle, De divinatione per somnum, transl. J. I. Beare, in Works of Aristotle,
Volume I, Chicago and London: William Benton, 462b11, 462b23, 463a27.
40
Aristotle, De divinatione, 463b5-15.
41
Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, London, 1607, p. 139.
42
Aristotle, De somno, in Gallop (ed) Aristotle, 454b23, p. 67.
43
Thomas Scot, Philomythie or Philomythologie, London, 1616, sigs. ¶v -¶2r.
25
44
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (1873-6), transl. Adrian Collins,
Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957, p. 6.
45
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense,’ in Daniel
Breazeale (ed) Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the
early 1870s, Brighton: Harvester, 1979, p. 85.
46
The classic study of early modern scepticism is Richard H. Popkin, The History of
Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, 1960, revised Berkeley and California:
University of California Press, 1979.
47
Michel de Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond, transl. M. A. Screech,
London: Penguin, 1987, pp. 51 and 46.
48
Pierre Charron, Of Wisdome, London, 1607, pp. 37 and 40.
49
Charron, Of Wisdome, p. 101.
50
The Sceptick, in William M. Hamlin, ‘A Lost Translation Found? An Edition of The
Sceptick (c.1590) Based on Extant Manuscripts [with text]’, English Literary
Renaissance 12:2 (2001), 42 and 43.
51
Jonathan Barnes, ‘The beliefs of a Pyrrhonist’, Proceedings of the Cambridge
Philological Society 208 (n.s.28), (1982), 1.
52
The Sceptick, 45.
53
Owen Feltham, Resolves or, Excogitations. A Second Centvrie, London, 1628, p.
282.
54
Artemidorus, The Iudgement, p. 73.
55
Gary K. Waite, ‘Talking Animals, Preserved Corpses and Venusberg: The
sixteenth-century magical world view and popular conceptions of the spiritualist
David Joris (c.1501-56)’, Social History 20:2 (1995), 146 and 147.
26