Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had, in their day, to undergo almost as much criticism and ridicule in England as they now meet with in some parts of the Continent. Even the establishment of the Dogs’ Home in London raised a storm of disapproval, as may be seen by any one who turns over the files of the Times for October, 1860. If the friends of humanity persevere, the change of sentiment which has become an accomplished fact in England will, in the end, triumph elsewhere.
Unfortunately, humane sentiment and humane practice do not progress on a level line. As long ago as 1782 an English writer named Soame Jenyns protested against the wickedness of shooting a bear on an inaccessible island of ice, or an eagle on the mountain’s top. “We are unable to give life and therefore ought not to take it away from the meanest insect without sufficient reason.” What would he say if he came back to earth to find whole species of beautiful winged creatures being destroyed to afford a barbarous ornament for women’s heads?
The “discovery” of Indian literature brought prominently forward in the West the Indian ideas of animals of which the old travellers had given the earliest news. The effect of familiarity with those ideas may be traced in many writers, but nowhere to such an extent as in the works of Schopenhauer, for whom, as for many more obscure students, they formed the most attractive and interesting part of Oriental lore. Schopenhauer cannot speak about animals without using a tone of passionate vehemence which was, without doubt, genuine. He felt the intense enjoyment in observing them which the lonely soul has ever felt, whether it belonged to saint or sinner. All his pessimism disappears when he leaves the haunts of man for the retreats of beasts. What a pleasure it is, he says, to watch a wild animal going about undisturbed! It shows us our own nature in a simpler and more sincere form. “There is only one mendacious being in the world, and that is man. Every other is true and sincere.” It strikes me that total sincerity did not shine on the face of a dog which I once saw trotting innocently away, after burying a rabbit he had caught in a ploughed field near a tree in the hedge—the only tree there was—which would make it easy for him to identify the spot. But about that I will say no more. The German “Friend of the Creature” was indignant at “the unpardonable forgetfulness in which the lower animals have hitherto been left by the moralists of Europe.” The duty of protecting them, neglected by religion, falls to the police. Mankind are the devils of the earth and animals the souls they torment.
Full of these sentiments, Schopenhauer was prepared to welcome unconditionally the Indian conception of the Wheel of Being and to close his eyes to its defects. Strauss, too, hailed it as a doctrine which “unites the whole of Nature in one sacred and mysterious bond”—a bond in which, he goes on to say, a breach has been made by the Judaism and dualism of Christianity. He might have observed that the Church derived her notions on the subject rather from Aristotle than from Semitic sources.
Schopenhauer came to the conclusion that the ill-treatment of animals arose directly from the denial to them of immortality, while it was ascribed to men. There is and there is not truth in this. When all is said, the well-conditioned man always was and always will be humane; “the righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.” And since people reason to fit their acts rather than act to fit their reasoning, he will even find a motive for his humanity where others find an excuse for the lack of it. Humphry Primatt wrote in 1776: “Cruelty to a brute is an injury irreparable because there is no future life to be a compensation for present afflictions.”
Mr. Lecky, in his “History of European Morals,” tells of a Cardinal who let himself be bitten by gnats because “we have heaven, but these poor creatures only present enjoyment!” Could Jaina do more?
Strauss thought that the rising tide of popular sentiment about animals was the direct result of the abandonment by science of the spiritualistic isolation of man from Nature. I suspect that those who have worked hardest for animals in the last half-century cared little about the origin of species, while it is certain that some professed evolutionists have been their worst foes. The fact remains, however, that by every rule of logic the theory of evolution ought to produce the effect which Strauss thought that it had produced. The discovery which gives its name to the nineteenth century revolutionises the whole philosophic conception of the place of animals in the Universe.
Lamarck, whom Cuvier so cruelly attacked, was the first to discern the principle of evolution. At one time he held the Chair of Zoology at the University of Paris; but the opposition which his ideas met with crushed him in body, though not in soul, and he died blind and in want in 1829, only consoled by the care of an admirable daughter. His last words are said to have been that it is easier to discover a truth than to convince others of it.
An Italian named Carlo Lessona was one of the first to be convinced. He wrote a work containing the phrase, “The intelligence of animals”—which work, by the rule then in force, had to be presented to the ecclesiastical Censor at Turin to receive his permit before publication. The canon who examined the book fell upon the words above mentioned, and remarked: “This expression, ‘intelligence of animals,’ will never do!” “But,” said Lessona, “it is commonly used in natural history books.” “Oh!” replied the canon, “natural history has much need of revision.”[[12]]
[12]. See Dr. F. Franzolini’s interesting monograph on animal psychology from the point of view of science (“Intelligenza delle Bestie,” Udine, 1899).