ABSTRACT

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. 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. 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.