The great and cautious Darwin said that the senses, intuitions, emotions, and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even, sometimes, in a well-developed condition in the lower animals. “Man, with all his noble qualities, his God-like intellect, still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. Our brethren fly in the air, haunt the bushes, and swim in the sea.” Darwin agreed with Agassiz in recognising in the dog something very like the human conscience.
Dr. Arnold said that the whole subject of the brute creature was such a painful mystery that he dared not approach it. Michelet called animal life a “sombre mystery,” and shuddered at the “daily murder,” hoping that in another globe “these base and cruel fatalities may be spared to us.” It is strange to find how many men of very different types have wandered without a guide in these dark alleys of speculation. A few of them arrived at, or thought they had arrived at, a solution. Lord Chesterfield wrote that “animals preying on each other is a law of Nature which we did not make, and which we cannot undo, for if I do not eat chickens my cat will eat mice.” But the appeal to Nature will not satisfy every one; our whole human conscience is a protest against Nature, while our moral actions are an attempt to effect a compromise. Paley pointed out that the law was not good, since we could live without animal food and wild beasts could not. He offered another justification, the permission of Scripture. This was satisfactory to him, but he must have been aware that it waives the question without answering it.
Some humane people have taken refuge in the automata argument, which is like taking a sleeping-draught to cure a broken leg. Others, again, look for justice to animals in the one and only hope that man possesses of justice to himself; in compensation after death for unmerited suffering in this life. Leibnitz said that Eternal Justice ought to compensate animals for their misfortunes on earth. Bishop Butler would not deny a future life to animals.
Speaking of her approaching death, Mrs. Somerville said: “I shall regret the sky, the sea, with all the changes of their beautiful colouring; the earth with its verdure and flowers: but far more shall I grieve to leave animals who have followed our steps affectionately for years, without knowing for certainty their ultimate fate, though I firmly believe that the living principle is never extinguished. Since the atoms of matter are indestructible, as far as we know, it is difficult to believe that the spark which gives to their union life, memory, affection, intelligence, and fidelity, is evanescent.”
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seven or eight small works, written in Latin in support of this thesis, were published in Germany and Sweden. Probably in all the world a number, unsuspectedly large, of sensitive minds has endorsed the belief expressed so well in the lines which Southey wrote on coming home to find that a favourite old dog had been “destroyed” during his absence:—
... “Mine is no narrow creed;
And He who gave thee being did not frame
The mystery of life to be the sport
Of merciless man! There is another world
For all that live and move—a better one!