The theory that human beings were each and every one in a spiritual sense, brothers, came later to trouble this fine old crusted indifference, and now after nearly two thousand years the idea has so completely infiltrated human consciousness, that the death agonies of men can no longer anywhere serve as diversion to the gentle and the good. But behind that sweeping assumption that we of all organic nature alone possess that element of immortality, binding us together with spiritual ties, and laying upon all the mutual obligations of justice and mercy, we have been nourishing a towering and brutal egotism, that moves blindly and stupidly about amid unreckonable multitudes of sentient fellow creatures; unaware of their lives, their passions, or their languages. Contracted inside the shell of this foolish prepossession we miss half the interest and wonder of the world we inhabit, and—thinking of ourselves all the while as an honest and merciful fellow—we play an unimaginable devil to our unhappy neighbours.
And yet I think even we at our worst would recoil could there be set before us in plain language the immitigable horrors of man's place in nature written from the point of view of even the most philosophic and amiable of the beasts. It makes the skin upon one's flesh crisp to reflect how black would be that long chronicle of poisonings, burnings, slayings, devourings. Those unmentionable tortures upon the vivisector's table; those maimings and clippings of well-loved pets to gratify a cheerful but perverted fancy; the treachery, ingratitude, and fantastic despotism practised every day, and always—throughout the whole indictment set forth by the accusing animals,—would be seen a dark, everflowing stream of innocent blood, spilled purely for man's idle recreation. The fanged Nero of the jungle, the very Heliogabalus of the cobras would seem spotless saints contrasted with this horrid record of the deeds of what are commonly called kindly and upright men. The beasts had never need to invent a devil myth. The model was always to their hand.
Cardinal Newman once remarked, with a sense of surprise, that "we know less of the animals than we do of the angels," and when one remembers the disproportionate attention given the two subjects this is hardly cause for wonder. One of the favourite texts of the never-ending debates of the schoolmen of the Middle Ages was the question whether sixty thousand angels would have room to stand on the point of a needle; and upon this and cognate subjects
... "Doctor and Saint—they heard great argument
About it, and About: and ever more
Came out by that same door wherein they went."
But of any study of what we call—in our topping human fashion—"the lower orders of creation" the history of the schools contains not a single record.
Even since science has begun to divert the world's mind from the study of the macrocosm, to the contemplation of the microcosm this same ingrained contempt and misunderstanding of the animals has led to the most amazing ideas. Descartes, whose study of the reflex actions of the muscles curiously anticipated some of the subtlest discoveries made recently in Chicago by Professor Loeb, propounded the theory, in his "Réponses," that animals were mere automata—which ate without pleasure, cried without pain, desired nothing, knew nothing, and only simulated intelligence as a bee simulates a mathematician. He says: "Among the movements that take place in us there are many which do not depend upon the mind at all, such as the beating of the heart, the digestion of food, nutrition, and respiration, walking, singing, and other similar actions when they are performed without the mind thinking of them. And when one, who falls from a height throws his hands forward to save his head, it is in virtue of no ratiocination that he performs this action. It does not depend upon his mind, but takes place merely because his senses being affected by present danger some change arises in his brain which affects the nerves in such a manner as is required to produce the motion, in the same manner as in a machine, and without the mind being able to hinder it. Now since we observe this in ourselves, why should we be so astonished if the light reflected from the body of a wolf into the eye of a sheep has the same force to excite it into the motion of flight?"
Why on the other hand should we refuse to think that the light reflected from the body of a lion into the eye of Descartes himself should have the power of exciting him into the motion of flight, without his mind being concerned in the matter at all—except that Descartes himself would assure us with his own lips that this was not so.
Our ignorance of the dialects of animals, our inability to understand the medium by which they convey their thoughts, makes it possible for men of even Descartes' abilities to generate such childish hypotheses. Even Huxley says blandly of animals that "Since they have no language they can have no trains of thought," though he admits that most of them possess that part of the brain which we have every reason to suppose to be the organ of consciousness in man.
It is one of the most regrettable results of this human egotism, which has dug so deep and permanent a gulf between ourselves and our fellow creatures, that we have made no concerted or intelligent effort to find a means of communication with our fellow beings. That such an effort would produce results worth the labour it would entail we have reason to infer from the surprising success that has followed our struggles to elucidate the meaning of the fragments of language sculptured on the broken stones that have been left by races extinct for thousands of years. We know how great are the barriers the varying tongues raise between living peoples: how much effort must be given to acquire a language foreign to us, even when surrounded by the sound of it in our daily life, and assisted by teachers, yet supreme human ingenuity has, from these fragments of broken stones, reconstructed dead tongues and forgotten histories of civilizations that for millenniums have been but dust blown through voiceless deserts. Yet in all the great lapse of ages during which man has been living in close intimacy with his domesticated animals not the slightest attempt has been made to cross the width of silence lying between him and his faithful companions.