Of a Monstrous Child

I saw, not long ago, a child brought to be viewed — for such things are exhibited, there being a trade in marvels — who had been born joined to another child at the torso, sharing some organs but possessing two heads, four arms, and all the doubled apparatus of separate beings above the joining. The peasants who had brought it to court called it a monster and spoke of it as an ill omen, a sign of divine displeasure, a disruption of the proper order of things. I looked at it and thought: here is simply a form that nature tried, and in trying demonstrated the range of what is possible, which is considerably wider than we ordinarily suppose.

The word monster comes, some say, from the Latin for showing or warning — the monstrous thing is the thing that demonstrates, that displays. But what it demonstrates is not, I think, the wrath of God or the failure of nature. It demonstrates the abundance of nature, which experiments without prejudice and produces the unlikely with the same authority as the expected. That a thing is rare does not make it a violation. It makes it a rarity. We have confused our own surprise at the unusual with a defect in the unusual thing itself.

“We call contrary to nature only what is contrary to custom; nothing is truly contrary to nature, since nature can produce nothing that is not from and of herself.”

What troubled me more than the child itself was the use to which we put it: the payments collected, the crowd gathered to be horrified and fascinated, the narrative of omen and portent laid over what was simply a child. We made it monstrous by our manner of receiving it. Nature made it unusual; we made it a spectacle.

I take from such encounters a renewed respect for the variety of creation and a renewed suspicion of my own instinct to classify what is strange as wrong. The strange is not wrong — it is strange. That is a different category entirely, and keeping the categories separate is one of the more useful contributions philosophy can make to ordinary life.