November 4, 1740

"Let not the reader start, at that expression, The soul of a cat."

The author of these words wrote them in the 1770s. He was the vicar of Broad Hembury in Devon. His name was Augustus Toplady (November 4,  1740 to August 11, 1778). 

Our excerpts below are designed to follow his argument about the abilities of man and those of the Creator. It is not about humility. His point is the nature of man.  (Another way of asking about the nature of the human, and divine, the physical and mental.) A subtle reading of his arguments reveals he is not arguing against free will. But that subtlety is not captured below.

His argument as we review it in his collected works, is contained in this question:

For what is brain but matter peculiarly modified? And who is the modifier? Not man, but God.

He will drag in St. Paul.

We cannot resolve this question, with certainty, any more than the other. We may, however, even on this occasion, address every one of our human brethren in those words of that great philosophic necessitarian, St. Paul : and ask, who maketh thee to dilffer from the lowest of the brute creation? Thy Maker's free-will, not thine. And what pre-eminence hast thou, which thou didst not receive from him? Not the least, nor the shadow of any. —Now, if thou didst [not acquire, but] receive it as a distinguishing gift of his free and sovereign pleasure, why carriest thou thyself proudly  as though thou hadst not received it [but created your talents yourself.] ....

He starts with the jokes. (Toplady is half Irish).

It seems most agreeable to the radical simplicity which God has observed in his works to suppose that, in themselves, all human ‘souls' are equal. I can easily believe that the soul of ...[a] woman has naturally the (unexpanded) powers of Grotius, or of Sir Isaac Newton: and that which conduces to raise the philosopher, the poet, the politician, or the linguist so much above the ignorant and stupid of mankind, is not only the circumstance of intellectual cultivation, but (still more than that) his having the happiness to occupy a better house, i. e. a body more commodiously organized, than they.

Toplady is still funny after centuries. (He and Wesley had previously crossed intellectual swords.)

The soul of a monthly reviewer, if imprisoned within the same mud walls which are tenanted by the soul of Mr. John Wesley, would, similarly .... reason and act (I verily think) exactly like the bishop of Moorfields. And I know some very sensible people who even go so far as to suppose that, was a human spirit shut up in the skull of a cat, puss would notwithstanding move prone on all fours, purr when stroked, spit when pinched, and birds and mice be her darling objects of pursuit.

Augustus Toplady was an Anglican priest and scholar. Most people know his hymn, "Rock of Ages." Fewer recall he thought animals (possibly) had a life after death.