Humanity Against Cruelty to Animals in Historical Literature, Timeline of Animal Rights History

Animal Rights History »» Joseph Butler

1736 | Analogy of Religion

Nor can we find any thing throughout the whole analogy of nature to afford us even the slightest presumption, that animals ever loser 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. (Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion [1736], "Of a Future Life")

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. (Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion [1736], "Of a Future Life")

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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 (First Edition: London, 1736) 3rd American Edition (New York, 1819; Digitized by Google, 2006).