The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660–1800 by Morillo John

Author:Morillo, John [Morillo, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2017-11-01T16:00:00+00:00

Richard Dean’s Gambit and James Rothwell’s Rebuttal

While Granger’s sermon’s failure invites conjectures that allow us to try to imagine the kind of audience that clerics were trying to convince to mend their ways, the reaction of one reader to another work published shortly before Granger’s helps us specify which nerves were touched or frayed when clerics pushed the cause of animals too far and turned kindness into likeness. In 1768, Richard Dean, Curate of Middleton and sometime schoolmaster in the Manchester area published An Essay on the Future Life of Brute Creatures as a theological meditation on divine reward undertaken to try to pull himself out of depression over his wife’s death. Dean’s essay, unlike Granger’s sermon, was based directly on his extensive knowledge of a prior canon of works on the question of animal souls. In it, Dean directly attacks Descartes’ machine hypothesis, insisting that brute animals are nothing like clocks. He further jousts with Pierre Bayle and Gottfried Leibniz, and arrives at the same problem of theodicy implicit in Granger’s sermon. Dean makes it explicit:

Only it appears pretty plain, that our moral Defects are the Grounds of all our Suffering, and that the grand Design of the Permission of natural Evil, is to deter us from Sin, and to excite us to the Practice of Piety and Virtue. But a Question, and that of some Importance, throws itself our Way here to be discussed. It is this, How does the Opinion that Pains and Diseases entered into the World through Sin, account for the suffering State of Brute Animals? Brutes are incapable of committing Sin, and if natural Evil derives only from this Source, how comes it to pass then, that they are so universally subject to it? (1: 105–6).21

Equally unable as Granger to explain animals’ constant suffering, Dean instead returns to the same theological remedy seen in Hodges’ text: for divine justice to be sound, animal souls must be compensated in a happy afterlife for all the suffering they endure in this one. But unlike Hodges, who concluded, perhaps reluctantly, that the brute “hath no knowledge or foresight of death (as Men in misery have) to put an end ere long to his bondage and misery; nor any of a Resurrection, or a future reward for his sufferings” (The Creatures Goodness, 38, my emphasis), Dean claims instead that it is only “human vanity” that makes us deny that animals do have immortal souls (Future Life, 2: xx).

His focus on suffering turns more modern when Dean, like Granger, emphasizes the key role of sensibility as susceptibility to pain and suffering, and makes animals’ sentient condition the way to win sympathy for their cause. But unlike Granger, he does not claim any universal state of animal happiness existed before people interfered, and instead emphasizes the importance of thriving and surviving for all of God’s creatures. Dean works within a view of that “mighty Chain of living Beings, which is the astonishment of all contemplative Minds” (Future Life, 2: 115–16).

Dean’s

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