Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

Representation, Hybridity, Ethics

Frank Palmeri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351929417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

Combining historical and interpretive work, this collection examines changing perceptions of and relations between human and nonhuman animals in Britain over the long eighteenth century. Persistent questions concern modes of representing animals and animal-human hybrids, as well as the ethical issues raised by the human uses of other animals. From the animal men of Thomas Rowlandson to the part animal-part human creature of Victor Frankenstein, hybridity serves less as a metaphor than as a metonym for the intersections of humans and other animals. The contributors address such recurring questions as the implications of the Enlightenment project of naming and classifying animals, the equating of non-European races and nonhuman animals in early ethnographic texts, and the desire to distinguish the purely human from the entirely nonhuman animal. Gulliver's Travels and works by Mary and Percy Shelley emerge as key texts for this study. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students who work in animal, colonial, gender, and cultural studies; and will appeal to general readers concerned with the representation of animals and their treatment by humans.

Chapter 1

Gross Metempsychosis and Eastern Soul

Chi-ming Yang

According to the Great Chain of Being, the cosmos, filled to capacity with divine creation, necessitates each creature’s predetermined station in an inter-connected system of nature’s gradations, with no unaccounted-for gaps. The placement of “man” at the middle of the Christian moral hierarchy from brutes to angels is meant to humble him before God and check his pride over the natural world. It is only fitting that this paradigm, dating from medieval Christianity, gains new currency in eighteenth-century England, when a God-ordered worldview must accommodate the discovery of new planets and continents, and a newly populated universe. Maintaining the uniqueness of masculine Western rationality amidst such epistemic upheaval becomes part of the Enlightenment enrollment of the exotic – the foreign plant, person, animal, or culture – in the production of universal truths. In an ever growing, ever shrinking world, the comparison of self with other across distances physical and metaphysical provokes uncanny resemblances, and absolute differences. In one paradigmatic instance, Alexander Pope describes the distinction between reason and sense, and by extension, human and animal, as “for ever sep’rate, yet for ever near!” A certain wistfulness is imputed to those lowly natures who remain excluded from the human race along a narrow yet inviolable border, and who “long to join, / Yet never pass th’insuperable line!”¹ Pope’s literary expression of an ultimately anthropocentric idea of nature and species distinction – forever separate, yet intimately connected – will be re-articulated later in the century in the protoscientific vocabulary of Linnaeus and Buffon, whose understandings of biological diversity order humans alongside plants, animals, and minerals in classification systems that follow the regime of nature’s chain and at the same time threaten human distinctiveness, in particular through the anatomical comparison of humans with simians.²

And yet the potential for humanity’s hybrid, if not animal nature is already broached by the Great Chain’s divinely-ordered state of plenitude, in which all living beings exist in dangerously close ontological proximity, differentiated only by infinitesimal degrees along a continuity of Being.³ While composite organisms, partplant, part-animal, for instance, confirm such a crowding together along the scale, “man” himself is understood to embody the meeting point of rational and sensual, intellectual and animal, and the precariously drawn boundaries of the outside world. This inner mixture of so-called high and low is also meant to explain the conflicting moral tendencies exhibited by human behavior, whether toward moderation or excess, piety or revolution. As historian Arthur Lovejoy has noted, “[Man] is, in a sense in which no other link in the chain is, a strange hybrid monster.”⁴ It has been argued that, in the early modern period, the theory of plentitude offers a way of comparing humans and animals by resemblance, analogy, allegory, or similitude – a “total system of correspondence” – which contrasts starkly with the Cartesian model of human superiority and relegation of animal to machine.⁵ But, whether we consider the beast within the human, the beast-like human, or the near-human beast, such logic of proximity or metaphorical hybridity does not account for the more radical possibility of becoming another. Put another way, despite the Great Chain’s ethical injunction to keep to one’s assigned place and maintain order in the world, what of the potential movement upward, or downward, on the scale?

Amidst the early Enlightenment debates over spirit, matter, and motion, another theory, the transmigration of souls – otherwise known as metempsychosis – likewise posits the organic continuity of all things living, making a circle of the Great Chain and enabling a movement between species that altogether dissolves Pope’s “insuperable line” between human and animal. A much-debated eighteenthcentury concept, the theory of transmigration circulates at a moment in the history of natural philosophy when the uniqueness of human rationality is called into question. The theory as it is handed down from classical antiquity supposes that the soul is immortal and can be separated from the body; the soul can be present in non-human bodies; and the soul forms the basis for personal identity. A supplemental theory of recollection suggests that the consciousness remains intact regardless of where the soul is housed, or whether it has been rewarded or punished in its next life.⁶ The idea that the soul, thought to be the body’s animating force, could thwart death and species by passing into another body not only verges on blasphemy, but also defies the anthropocentrism of the day and comes under attack by those who stake a claim in a divinely-ordered Christian cosmography and in Western rationality. Turning to historical accounts of the afterlife, these writers rationalize reincarnation as a praiseworthy, ancient Greek pedagogy of punishment and reward on the one hand, and, on the other, a novel and misguided Eastern superstition masquerading as a form of spirituality in the current day. Something called the East is invariably a source of blame or inspiration for karmic thinking, and in turn, exemplifies the threat of an excessive fluidity between human and animal.

An itinerant soul wandering between bodies – a potential indication of difference lodged within oneself – is considered the stuff of myth, de-mystified by rationalism and re-mystified by didactic fiction and Europeanized Oriental tales quick to harness the novel narrative perspectives of metamorphosed beings and foreign observers, and at the same time relegate any hint of non-Christian, out-of-body experience to a feature of Eastern extravagance. In the literary, religious, and philosophical debates around mysticism, metempsychosis, and the general dismissal of transmigration’s validity, cultural difference, I will suggest, becomes a mediating force in the negotiation of species distinction; to understand the animal-human divide in this instance is to consider as well the differentiation of East from West.

Rationalizing Spirit

Despite its disruption of the natural order, the doctrine of transmigration does appeal to certain Christian thinkers for its emphasis on divine spirit and the extra-terrestrial life of the soul. Beginning with Henry More’s Philosophical Poems (1647) and later, The Immortality of the Soul (1659), the school of Cambridge Platonists adapts Origen’s ancient theological teachings on the soul’s pre-existence into a spiritual philosophy of the soul’s eternal travels outside the human body, between heaven and earth. God creates souls first, and their different components or faculties dictate the suitability of the body – terrestrial, aerial, or ethereal – into which they will enter; higher or lower faculties of the soul predominate depending on the type of activity in which the being will be engaged.⁷ The general trajectory of the soul moves from heaven downward into corporeality, and back into aerial and ethereal states after the body’s death. As the spirit ascends, it occupies progressively rarefied bodies. Bodies, in turn, are not only inseparable from but also operative in the world of spirits. To this end, Platonist Joseph Glanvill refuses the idea that one could recollect a past state of being, arguing that a “corporeal impress” is necessary for the making of memory. As Glanvill insists:

[W]e were placed on this stage as it were to begin the world again, so as if we had not existed before. Whence it seems meet, that there should be an utter obliteration of all that is past, so as not to be able by memory to connect the former life and this together. The memory whereof, if we were capable of it, would be inconsistent with … the present Scene of things.⁸

Even while transmigration introduces the possibility for wildly different life experiences to be witnessed by a single consciousness, the limits to trans-species awareness are here made readily apparent. Moreover, the difficulty of imagining how the transfer of souls between old and new bodies actually works is evidenced by one minister’s challenge to the preeminent Henry More: “And do you think that all the Angels in Heaven, and all Created Souls may be in one Body? … If so, Are they one Soul there, or innumerable in one man?”⁹ The internal crowding hypothesized here suggests as unacceptable an unbalanced equation between form and self, or selves, as the case may be.

Ultimately, the soul’s pre-existence is meant to uphold divine order by justifying God’s ways to the world. If original sin has already been committed by rebellious angels previous to the creation of human beings on earth, then humans do not technically enter the world as innocents, and the divine is absolved of any charge of unjust or cruel punishment. To the contrary, being reborn into a terrestrial body should count as a blessing. Jonathan Israel has recently argued that any philosophy that so affirms the “divine origin of moral concepts” – divine providence, miracles, the afterlife, and especially the immortality of the soul – essentially upholds Descartes’ separation of being into two spheres, spiritual and mechanistic, and thus works against the secular reason of truly radical Enlightenment thinkers.¹⁰ Unlike Descartes, however, who demonstrates the mathematical reality of the external world by deducing it from the existence of God, the Platonists argue the futility of such intellectual proof. Along with empiricists like Royal Society scientist Robert Boyle, they differ from strict rationalists by calling for limits to human reason. Given the impossibility of absolute certainty, the Platonists preach an epistemological standard of moral certainty that attempts to reconcile revealed religion with philosophy of reason. They redefine reason as a heightened consciousness of an expansive, holistic “spirit of Nature” or “plastic nature” that embodies truth and goodness, and is everywhere in motion and present in the physical world. Fierce opponents to atheism, they present a counter cosmology to the Cartesian emphasis on matter, the Hobbesian determinism of sense impressions, and Calvinism’s requisite and restrictive doctrine of pre-destination, alike.¹¹

Certainly, Glanvill’s support of miracles fuels his unorthodox pursuit of the supernatural including a strong interest in witchcraft. But the metaphysical outlook of these Christian apologists, even if not radical by Enlightenment standards, nonetheless offers an unusual leveling of humans and animals on a spiritual plane, especially with reference to the ancient East. Influenced by More, Glanvill, in Lux Orientalis, or An Enquiry into the Opinion of the Eastern Sages concerning the Praexistence of Souls (1682), goes so far as to appeal to the “Orient” as the source of illuminating reason: “[S]ince our inquiries are benighted in the West, let us look towards the East, from whence ’tis likely the desired light may display it self, and chase away the darkness that covers the face of those theories.” Glanvill’s list of enlightened thinkers includes “Indian Brachmans, the Persian Magi, the Aegyptian Gymnosophists, the Jewish Rabbins, some of the Graecian Philosophers, and Christian Fathers” (26). He and his fellow philosophers also draw from the “pagan” writings of Plato, Socrates, Plotinus, and Pythagoras to articulate a world of universal soul, where spirit constitutes the highest form of rationalism. Borrowing from this range of ancient and “Oriental” belief systems, their Anglican brand of Platonism espouses the pervasiveness of spirit in the terrestrial world as an eternal truth on which nature is patterned.¹²

Later generations of theosophists, with interests in Buddhism and Brahmanism, will name the Cambridge Platonists as “Mystic Guides.”¹³ Vegetarians of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cite Linnaeus and the comparative anatomists on the one hand, and metempsychosis and Henry More on the other, as authorities on the special kinship between humans and animals that makes meat-eating unacceptable. The network of animal advocacy groups of the period includes the New Christian Society of Metempsychosians, promoters of a sabbath for animals and vegetarianism as “the holy doctrine of Pythagoras and the Indian school, which ascribes to every living creature an eternal existence.”¹⁴ Timothy Morton has written extensively about the philosopher-poet revolutionaries of the Romantic period, the so-called English “Bramins,” for whom non-animal consumption is a spiritual and political act; and yet, their association with the East goes unexamined.¹⁵ The title of “Bramin” or “Pythagorean,” common designations for vegetarians, can be further understood as an early eighteenth-century hybridization of East and West and, often, the Christian citation of Hindu reincarnation in particular as a precedent for forward thinking. In one account, Christian deist J.Z. Holwell argues from a diffusionist perspective that transmigration and its attendant practice of vegetarianism spreads from East to West, originating with Brahmanism, and not Pythagoras, the Egyptians, or any of the other commonly cited ancients. He claims that God reveals himself first to the Hindus through Bramah, and only later through Christ; the descriptions in Genesis, he argues, are only a figurative account of creation derived from the primordial East.¹⁶

Following the Cambridge Platonists, Holwell reasons that the soul, if indeed created by God to be immortal, must have existed in previous states separate from the body. Compared with other world religions, Christians are in the minority for refusing to see that “man and brute” share a common soul: “The ancient doctrine of the Metempsychosis of Bramah, at once answers the matter in question [why were brutes made if not for the use of man], and would afford full satisfaction to a Gentoo, a Tartar, or a Chinese, but not to a Christian” (135). In the analysis he sets out in his Dissertation on Metempsychosis (1766), the primitive truths of all religions, based as they are on Brahmanism, describe God’s construction of the universe for the containment of apostate angels. The souls of humankind are none other than the remains of unpurified spirits after they have passed through an obligatory 88 mortal forms. For Holwell, the progression of the soul intimately connects brutes to humans, and explains the biblical directives against the human consumption of animals. As brutes are not made for human use, eating them constitutes murder. Man is only justified in killing (but not eating) beasts, Holwell writes, in the case that they threaten his food source. Like other Christian metempsychosians, he subscribes to a strict teaching on temperance that forbids the eating of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction Representation, Hybridity, Ethics
• 1 Gross Metempsychosis and Eastern Soul
• 2 The Lady and the Lapdog: Mixed Ethnicity in Constantinople, Fashionable Pets in Britain
• 3 Gulliver’s Travels and Studies of Skin Color in the Royal Society
• 4 Gulliver the Houyahoo: Swift, Locke, and the Ethics of Excessive Individualism
• 5 The Autocritique of Fables
• 6 Animal Nomenclature: Facing Other Animals
• 7 Man’s Animal Nature: Science, Art, and Satire in Thomas Rowlandson’s “Studies in Comparative Anatomy”
• 8 “Listen to Me”: Frankenstein as an Appeal to Mercy and Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals
• 9 Shelley’s Great Chain of Being: From “blind worms” to “new-fledged eagles”
• 10 Gulliver and the Lives of Animals
• 11 Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: The Play of Species in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon
• Bibliography
• Index