Philosopher dissuades his Hearers from eating Flesh:

Thus all things are but alter'd, nothing dies,
And here and there th' unbody'd Spirit flies:
By Time, or Force, or Sickness dispossess'd,
And lodges where it lights, in Bird or Beast,
Or hunts without till ready Limbs it find,
And actuates those according to their Kind:
From Tenement to Tenement is toss'd:
The Soul is still the same, the Figure only lost.
Then let not Piety be put to Flight,
To please the Taste of Glutton-Appetite;
But suffer inmate Souls secure to dwell,
Lest from their Seats your Parents you expel;
With rabid Hunger feed upon your Kind,
Or from a Beast dislodge a Brothers Mind.

_Plato_ in the Vision of _Erus_ the _Armenian_, which I may possibly
make the Subject of a future Speculation, records some beautiful
Transmigrations; as that the Soul of _Orpheus_, who was musical,
melancholy, and a Woman-hater, entered into a Swan; the Soul of _Ajax_,
which was all Wrath and Fierceness, into a Lion; the Soul of
_Agamemnon_, that was rapacious and imperial, into an Eagle; and the
Soul of _Thersites_, who was a Mimick and a Buffoon, into a Monkey. [2]

Mr. _Congreve_, in a Prologue to one of his Comedies, [3] has touch'd
upon this Doctrine with great Humour.

Thus_ Aristotle's _Soul of old that was,
May now be damn'd to animate an Ass;