“It is evident that the notion of spirits, imagined by savages and adopted by the ignorant, is calculated to retard the progress of knowledge, since it precludes our researches into the true cause of the effects which we see, by keeping the human mind in apathy and sloth. This state of ignorance may be very useful to crafty theologians, but very injurious to society. This is the reason, however, why in all ages priests have persecuted those who have been the first to give natural explanations of the phenomena of nature— as witness: Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Galileo, Descartes—and, more recently, Richard Carlile, William Lawrence, Robert Taylor, and Abner Kneeland; to which we may add the name of the learned and venerable Thomas Cooper M. D., lately president of Columbia College, South Carolina.”

— H.D. Robinson (1835), notes to Baron d’Holbach’s The System of Nature [1]

“Returning to Paley's attack on materialist science, however, the seriousness of the issues raised in Natural Theology was illustrated some years later by the case of the physiologist William Lawrence. Lawrence fell foul of the medical establishment for An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology (1816) and Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (1819), where he argued that life was a result of physical organization rather than a quasi-electro-chemical 'vital fluid' which would somehow indicate the existence of a soul. He was suspended from the Royal College of Surgeons and refused the copyright of the offending books, which ironically added to their circulation in pirated editions by radical publishers, including Richard Carlile.”

— Martin Priestman (2000), Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-1830 [2]

“The representations of all the animals being brought before Adam in the first instance and subsequently of their being collected in the ark... are zoogically impossible.”

— William Lawrence (1819), Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man: Delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons (pg. 249). Callow.