So a few words of introduction, why it can be refreshing to look at Aquinas on human emotions.

Around the year 2000, I forget whether it was before or after, the government paid for some adverts on television about 9 p.m., encouraging teenagers to have safe sex.

And we were treated to clips of rhinoceroses copulating and swans courting.

And a voiceover in a Scottish accent said,

They don't have emotions. They don't make commitments. and a voiceover in a Scottish accent said,

They don't have emotions, they don't make commitments, you're different.

And I thought, but some animals do make commitments,

and if you've had a pet or worked on a farm, you know perfectly well that they have emotions.

And then around the same time there were a few newspaper headlines saying with some surprise,

scientists have proved that animals are conscious.

And I thought, but Thomas Aquinas knew they were conscious in the 13th century,

and Aristotle knew it in the 3rd century BC.

So there is a myth around that emotions and consciousness are peculiar to human beings. And clearly those are myths,

and some people find the busting of those myths a bit disturbing.

We know that a large part of human psychology is animal psychology, and animals,

at least the higher animals, have lots of similarities to us. Why should that be surprising?

And I think it's because for some centuries,

many people have supposed that the human body

and animals are just machines.

That goes back fairly or unfairly to Descartes,

who explicitly suggested that the human body and the animal body are hydraulic machines,

but the human being has a soul which uses the pineal gland which he thought was

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