Animal Souls and Immortality in the Browne-Baxter Debate

Abstract

This paper examines an overlooked episode in early modern controversies over animals: the “reconstructed” debate between Browne and Baxter. Both respond to a dilemma articulated by Locke: given the eighteenth-century British consensus that animals are genuinely sentient, either God has endowed their bodies with cognitive capacities, or animals possess immaterial and naturally immortal souls. In seeking to navigate the thorny problems posed by both horns, Browne and Baxter diverge sharply despite sharing Christian and anti-freethinker commitments. Browne draws a categorical distinction between animal perception and human thought, allowing the former to arise from bodily processes while reserving immateriality and immortality for humans alone. Baxter, by contrast, grants that animals possess immaterial souls and are naturally immortal, while remaining non-committal about their actual eternal afterlife. Their debate reveals how a shared theological framework could yield divergent conclusions about non-human creatures, with Baxter’s position anticipating more animal-friendly developments in later eighteenth-century thought.