What Makes Man Different from Animals.11

John Gray on John Stuart Mill:

"[M]an is to be conceived as a reflective and self-critical agent, actively engaged in the open-ended venture of exploring his own powers and the world that he has created for himself. What distinguishes man from the inhabitants of the animal kingdom, and gives him a special relationship with nature, is only his capacity for reflective thought and deliberate choice; but this is of capital importance. For, unlike that of an animal, the shape of a man's life is not ordained in advance by a repertoire of unalterable instincts, but is never less than the permanently revisable product of his own past thought and action. Man, unlike the animals, is a progressive being. But Mill never unreservedly took this to mean that moral improvement or social progress are inevitable features of the human prospect. Being a progressive being means that man's life is not bound by any fixed, unalterable natural endowment, but is rather the unforseeable product of men's choices and experiments upon themselves."