Animals Have Souls and Every Right to Live, and Have Their Being, as Much as We Do

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 34 pages

Thirty-four pages in four sections, built around the article Have Animals Souls? which appeared in The Theosophist in January 1886 and which Blavatsky mentioned in a letter to Sinnett from Wurzburg. It is the most sustained ethical argument in this batch, and it starts from practice rather than doctrine: the merry massacres of sport and the horrors of vivisection are, in the first section's phrase, most objectionable to occult philosophy.

The second section makes the case that intelligence is not the prerogative of man — sophistry is — and the third states the conclusion the title carries, that animals have souls and every right to live and have their being as much as we do. The fourth draws the distinction that keeps the argument coherent: Karma as a moral law does not apply to animals, nor to children, nor to the insane, none of whom bear moral responsibility, so that the claim being made is about the reality of the animal soul rather than about moral agency. It closes on a section titled a vindication of the rights of brutes. Boris de Zirkoff's compiler's notes are extensive, and identify the de Mirville volumes she quotes throughout.

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