Notes on Animals in the Early Nineteenth Century: Observation, Experimentation, Ethics

In this essay I focus on the role that observing animals played in the context of speculations on the limit between animals and humans, and especially on the effect that these observations had in serving as a foundation for the treatment of animals. I suggest that observation played a picotal role not just in providing material, for instance for establishing classifications of living beings or formulating a rule about the characteristics of a certain species: observation also proved to be a tool for questioning precisely the generalisation of a newly discovered natural feature of a specific animal. Personal observations of an animal specimen could then lead either to the confirmation of a rule or to its destabilisation. It is in this sense that even private observations of individual researchers, and notes scribbled in notebooks (such as Schopenhauer's), gain importance in investigating how the understanding of the relation between man and animal took in the period from the end of the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century.