We have never not been inhuman

This essay uses a reading of an emblem of Fortuna from George Wither's Collection of Emblemes (1635) to challenge one interpretation of Western modernity: the notion that a mathematicized theory of nature involved an unprecedented inclusion of limit cases - counterfactual or impossible states of affairs - into accounts of the real behavior of bodies. Instead of viewing the arrival of such mathematical limit cases as the beginning of a worldview that embraced the inhuman, the essay argues that pre-modern texts and cultural forms also made use of known impossibilities in the form of visual or narrative abstractions: these too were limit cases of actual experiences (rather than pure impossibilities), thus, we have never not been inhuman.