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Animal Rights History Timeline » [1660-1785] Enlightenment » Joseph Butler

Joseph Butler

The Analogy of Religion

Of A Future Life

[1736] Joseph Butler, "Of A Future Life," in The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature, to which are Added Two Brief Dissertations: I. Of Personal Identity: II. Of the Nature of Virtue (1736; New York, 1819; Google Books: Online Library of Free eBooks).

From our being born into the present world in the helpless imperfect state of infancy, and having arrived from thence to mature age, we find it to be a general law of nature in our own species, that the same creatures, the same individuals, should exist in degrees of life and perception, with capacities of action, of enjoyment and suffering, in one period of their being, greatly different from those appointed them in another period of it. And in other creatures the same law holds. (45)

Nor can we find any thing throughout the whole analogy of nature, to afford us even the slightest presumption, that animals ever lose their living powers; much less, if it were possible, that they lose them by death; for we have no faculties wherewith to trace any beyond or through it, so as to see what becomes of them. This event removes them from our view. It destroys the sensible proof, which we had before their death, of their being possessed of living powers, but does not appear to afford the least reason to believe that they are, then, or by that event, deprived of them.(47)