The Modern Hermeticist | A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes - Thomas Taylor (1792) @TheModernHermeticist | Uploaded June 2023 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
The following introductory remarks are by Louise Schutz Boas (1965) and are important for understanding the context in which this text was written:

"A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes is an exercise in irony, a witty, merry book in which Taylor, using the weapon of laughter, professed agreement with the radical ideas recently published by two of his friends, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, and by carrying these to their logical extremes, reduced them to absurdity. That it was their ideas which eventually triumphed does not lessen the reader's enjoyment of his wit, or alter the usefulness of his parody of what he regarded as an oversimplification of the nature of man, an over-generalization of the worth of all men, and an egalitarianism he could not accept..."

"Indirectly Taylor's mock-serious defence of the rights of brutes stemmed from the publication in November 1790, little more than a year after the storming of the Bastille, of Edmund Burke's unsympathetic Reflections on the French Revolution. This book led to an immediate reply from Mary Wollstonecraft; two editions of her open letter to Burke, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, were published in November 1790, followed in 1792 by her more famous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Of the great spate of refutations of Burke's Reflections the most powerful, famous, and effective was Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, written in 1790, published in London in 1791, and swiftly banned; to own or to sell a copy was a criminal offence, but four months later Paine wrote to his friend George Washington that already eleven thousand of the sixteen thousand copies printed had been sold. Paine, very helpful in the American Revolution, was now active in the French Revolution, with a seat at the Convention. He had left England for Paris before this first part of the Rights of Man was published; he returned, but in 1792 when the second part was published he fled to France to avoid the trial for seditious libel it provoked. The magic phrase, "the rights of man," used decorously in America, was in France highly inflammatory, as indeed it tends to be today when on all sides, in many parts of the modern world, there are repetitive cries of the right to strike, to vote, to assemble, to march, to demonstrate."

"Mary Wollstonecraft as a guest in Taylor's home had called his study "the abode of peace." He was not in sympathy with her radical ideas or those of Paine; he was not an advocate of an egalitarian world, but if they insisted upon agitation for this, he could show them how much farther they must carry their theories. His Vindication of the Rights of Brutes endeavors to demonstrate that who has said A must say B; and that B leads on to an unforeseen Z."

"Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men was not concerned wholly with political rights or the injustices suffered by the poor. She was angered by Burke's tendency to "vitiate reason" which she postulated as man's highest quality, leading him to virtue, and so distinguishing him from the animals, who have not the gift of reason. This is the sounding board for Taylor, who sets out to prove that animals have reason; he supports his thesis with multiple quotation from the Greek philosophers, thereby making his point without direct statement that men are not equally blessed with reason. He believed that "in every class of beings in the universe... there is a first, a middle, and a last, in order that the progression of things may form one unbroken chain, originating in deity, and terminating in matter... a golden chain of beings" formed by the first and smallest class, the multitude forming the lowest. He set out therefore to show the impracticability of an egalitarian society."

"The worship of animals, and the statues of gods with animal heads or bodies Taylor offered as an indication of the high estimation in which men have held the brute creation whose rights he was now demanding. Lacking time to pursue the matter further, he left to others the task of vindicating the rights of rocks and stones and trees, and the very dust beneath men's feet..."

Full text freely available here: books.google.ca/books?id=A-hhAAAAcAAJ&pg=PR1#v=onepage&q&f=false

#platonism #neoplatonism #history #philosophy #literature #thomastaylor

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