In Possession, Without Understanding

John Ray spends three pages in 1690 refusing to agree with Descartes, Gassendi, and Dr. Willis that an animal is, body and soul together, "a meer Machine." His evidence is specific and almost comic: a dog chasing a ball toward a table too high to reach will first mount a nearby stool, and crucially, its first leap toward the stool is not aimed straight at the stool but "oblique and much declining" from it — bent, Ray argues,