Free Thoughts upon the Brute-Creation: or, an Examination of Father Bougeant’s Philosophical Amusement, &c. In Two Letters to a Lady.
London: for R. Minors, 1742. softcover. Two parts (the latter dated 1743), each with separate register, pagination, and title, octavo: [A]2 B-I4 (= 34 leaves). [4], 64 pp. Engraved frontispiece; [A]2 B-M4 (= 46 leaves). [4], 88 pp. Contemporary marbled wrappers. Mild foxing at final leaves, ink marks at final page. A nearly fine copy, with a fine frontispiece of Adam and Eve amidst the animals, engraved by M. Van der Gucht.
First edition of this respose by the schoolmaster John Hildrop (1682-1756) to the Amusement philosophique sur le langage des bêtes (The Hague, 1739), by Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant (1690-1743). In that popular work, English versions of which immediately appeared at London and Dublin, the French Jesuit dared to suggest that animals could communicate with one another in their own languages, though he ascribed these functions to the operations of evil spirits, rather than instinct or mechanism. The outcry against Bougeant’s outrageous suggestion (that animals can communicate) resulted in his exile to La Fleche. Complaining that the Jesuit had “treated a noble subject loosely and superficially,” Hildrop attempts to prove that the animal soul exists in a state of degradation as a result of the Fall, and so man is responsible for bringing ruin to animals more noble than he: “Could we converse with them in their own Language… we might then perhaps have Reason to agree… that they think and act more rationally, have more Sense, more Honour, and more Virtue, are better Philosophers, and deeper Politicians, than some of the finest Folks in Great-Britain” (pp. 56-7). A friend and correspondent of Zachary Grey, the schoolmaster and rector John Hildrop... vigorously opposed the deists and is best remembered for his “various fugitive essays of a satirico-polemical stamp” (ODNB). Near fine. Item #53214
References: ESTC T82058. L. C. Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man Machine, pp. 329; 136-41, where Bougeant’s Amusement philosophique is discussed at length; 218 note 1: “... Some have thought that the German doctor Daniel Sennert claimed an immortal soul for animals. See his Institutiones medicinae (1637), parts 4-5, and his De origine et natura animarum in brutis (1638). H. S. Salt, Animals’ Rights (1894), 106-107, second in a chronological listing of works available in the English language, noted after Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1723).
Price: $750.00