From vices turn to virtues, and pause for a moment in reflection on the many lovable qualities of the dog. Where in man do we find such affection, forgiveness, general amiability, constancy and patience; and in the case of the horse, such a willingness to labour without any thought of recompense. It makes me positively ill, when I hear hopelessly immoral men and women—gossips, slanderers, breadsnatchers, usurers, sweaters—speak condescendingly of animals—of dogs and horses that are on an infinitely higher moral plane than ever they have been, or ever will be. But moral superiority is not the only superiority that man fallaciously assumes. He lays claim to an intellectual superiority, which is equally fallacious, equally a myth. No one who has ever studied animal and insect life can but have been impressed with the marvels of ingenuity and skill displayed therein. The web of the common garden spider and the nest of the wren, for example, are every whit as wonderful in their way as the architectural works of Inigo Jones or Christopher Wren. On the grounds of a moral and mental inferiority, therefore, the argument of a future life for the human species only, fails. Another argument, an argument advanced by the most bigotted of the religious denominationalists, is “that man only has a conscience, and that conscience which he alone possesses is the only passport to another world. Without conscience there can be no soul, and without soul there can be no hope of a continuation of life after death.” This, of course, is merely assumption, as is nearly all the teaching of the Churches. Conscience, like religion, depends to a very large extent on climate. A man born in the centre of Africa might not think it wrong to do things that would appear appalling to a Plymouth Brother, and vice versa. There is at present no fixed and universal standard of right and wrong, any more than there is a fixed and universal standard of beauty—for as each eye forms its own idea of feminine loveliness, so each heart forms its own conception of honour and dishonour, virtue and vice. We know that this is the case as far as mankind is concerned, and we have nothing beyond assumption to assure us that it is not so throughout the animal and insect world. If the animals have no conception of a moral standard, how is it that they do not destroy one another? That the instinct to injure people is innate in us is readily proved by the joy nearly all of us take in saying disparaging things of our neighbours. We go so far, and we would undoubtedly go the whole hog and kill those we hate, if something more, perhaps, than the mere fear of hanging did not hold us back. That restraining something is unquestionably the fear of the Future, and it is that fear which I am inclined to think is the origin of what we term our consciences. Were we sure there was no future existence, there would be no moral restraint (it would only be the prospect of legal punishment that would deter us from injuring other people to our heart’s content), we should have no consciences; and if this is applicable to mankind, why is it not applicable to other forms of animal life?
Is it not feasible to suppose that it is this same fear of the future that acts as a preventive to animals killing one another indiscriminately? That they do at times rob and kill for other motives than to satisfy their hunger is indisputable, but these exceptional cases prove what I am trying to maintain—that there is some restraining influence that keeps the vast majority highly moral; and I see no feasible arguments for not supposing this influence to be a conscience begat by a deep-rooted fear of what may await them on physical dissolution.
And if this applies to the mammals, why not to the whole animal, insect, and vegetable worlds—to everything that has life, for Science has yet to prove that where there is life, there is not also intelligence.
The superior morality of animals to man, then, may be considered as due to their more powerful consciences, and to their stronger fear of the possibility of the superphysical. And why should they have a much stronger fear? Because, unquestionably, they have a more intimate knowledge of the Unknown than has man. No one who has had much to do with dogs and horses can doubt this. Who that has ridden through woods and jungles, or lonely country roads at night, has not seen their horse suddenly stop and evince every evidence of fear. Though the human eye has seen nothing to account for it, the horse obviously has seen something, and it has only been by dint of the utmost coaxing and petting that the sagacious animal has been persuaded to continue its course. It is the same with dogs. Over and over again I have had dogs with me in houses alleged to be haunted, and they have suddenly manifested symptoms of the greatest, the most uncontrollable fear. I have endeavoured to pacify them, to urge them to follow me, but it has been in vain; though obedient and fearless as a rule, they have suddenly become the most disobedient and incorrigible of cowards. Why? Because I am certain they have seen and heard things which, for some unaccountable reason, have been held back from me.
If knowledge, then, of another life is any plea for the bestowal of an unperishable spirit, animals should live again even more surely than man. And so also should the vegetable world, for I have myself seen trees violently agitated, as if with paroxysms of the most sublime terror, before the advent of superphysical phenomena.
And stronger than any of these arguments is that of the ghosts themselves. There are innumerable and well-authenticated cases of hauntings by the phantasms of dogs, horses, birds, insects, and trees, and it is, perhaps, chiefly through these hauntings that we can disprove the theory that man possesses a monopoly of the immaterial planes; a theory which, were it not for his insufferable egotism and conceit, he would never have advanced.
CHAPTER XI
A HAUNTING IN REGENT’S PARK, AND MY FURTHER VIEWS WITH REGARD TO SPIRITUALISM
Before concluding my experiences in the parks and commons of London, I will cite one other case, a case which serves to illustrate the theme I have just been discussing.