“Pain, terror, mortal agonies, which scare
Thy heart in man, to brutes thou wilt not spare.
Are theirs less sad and real? Pain in man
Bears the high mission of the flail and fan;
In brutes, ’tis purely piteous.”
Pain is the one supreme evil of the existence of the lower animals, an evil which (so far as we can see) has no countervailing good. As to death, a painless one—so far from being the supreme evil to them—is often the truest mercy. Thus, instead of the favorite phrase of certain physiologists, that “they would put hecatombs of brutes to torture to save the smallest pain of a man,” true ethics bids us regard man’s moral welfare only as of supreme importance, and anything which can injure it (such, for example, as the practice, or sanction of the practice, of cruelty) as the worst of evils, even if along with it should come a mitigation of bodily pain. On this subject, the present Bishop of Winchester has put the case in a nutshell. “It is true,” he said, “that man is superior to the beast, but the part of man which we recognize as such is his moral and spiritual nature. So far as his body and its pains are concerned, there is no particular reason for considering them more than the body and bodily pains of a brute.”
Of course, the ground is cut from under us in this whole line of argument by those ingenious thinkers who have recently disinterred (with such ill-omened timeliness for the vivisection debate) Descartes’ supposed doctrine, that the appearance of pain and pleasure in the brutes is a mere delusion, and that they are only automata,—“a superior kind of marionettes, which eat without pleasure, cry without pain, desire nothing, know nothing, and only simulate intelligence as a bee simulates a mathematician.” If this conclusion, on which modern science is to be congratulated, be accepted, it follows, of course, that we should give no more consideration to the fatigue of a noble hunter than to the creaking wood of a rocking-horse; and that the emotions a child bestows on its doll will be more serious than those we bestow on a dog who dies of grief on his master’s grave. Should it appear to us, however, on the contrary (as it certainly does to me), that there is quite as good evidence that dogs and elephants reason as that certain physiologists reason, and a great deal better evidence that they—the animals—feel, we may perhaps dismiss the Cartesianism of the nineteenth century, and proceed without further delay to endeavor to define more particularly the fitting sentiment of man to sentient brutes. We have seen we ought to start with a distinct sense of some degree of moral responsibility as regards them. What shape should that sense assume?
We have been in the habit of indulging ourselves in all manner of antipathies to special animals, some of them having, perhaps, their source and raison d’être in the days of our remote but not illustrious ancestors,
“When wild in woods the noble savage ran”;
or those of a still earlier date, who were, as Mr. Darwin says, “arboreal in their habits,” ere yet we had deserved the reproach of having “made ourselves tailless and hairless and multiplied folds to our brain.” Other prejudices, again, are mere personal whims, three-fourths of them being pure affectation. A man will decline to sit in a room with an inoffensive cat, and a lady screams at the sight of a mouse, which is infinitely more distressed at the rencontre than she. I have known an individual, otherwise distinguished for audacity, “make tracks” across several fields to avoid a placidly ruminating cow. In our present stage of civilization, these silly prejudices are barbarisms and anachronisms, if not vulgarisms, and should be treated like exhibitions of ignorance or childishness. For our remote progenitors before mentioned, tusky and hirsute, struggling for existence with the cave bear and the mammoth in the howling wilderness of a yet uncultured world, there was no doubt justification for regarding the terrible beasts around them with the hatred which comes of fear. But the animal creation, at least throughout Europe, has been subdued for ages; and all its tribes are merely dwellers by sufferance in a vanquished province. Their position as regards us appeals to every spark of generosity alight in our bosoms, and ought to make us ashamed of our whims and antipathies toward beings so humble. Shall man arrogate the title of “lord of creation,” and not show himself, at the least, bon prince to his poor subjects? It is not too much to ask that, even toward wild animals, our feelings should be those of royal clemency and indulgence,—of pleasure in the beauty and grace of such of them as are beautiful; of admiration for their numberless wondrous instincts; of sympathy with their delight in the joys of the forest and the fields of air. Few, I suppose, of men with any impressionability can watch a lark ascending into the sky of a summer’s morning without some dim echo of the feelings which inspired Shelley’s Ode. This is, however, only a specially vivid instance of a sympathy which might be almost universal, and which, so far as we learn to feel it, touches all nature for us with a magic wand.
If we are compelled to fight with them, if they are our natural enemies and can never be anything else, then let us wage war upon them in loyal sort, as we contended against the Russians at Balaklava; and, if we catch any prisoners, deal with them chivalrously or at least mercifully. This, indeed (to do justice to sportsmen, much as I dislike their pursuit), I have always observed to be the spirit of the old-fashioned country gentleman, before the gross slaughtering of battues and despicable pigeon-matches were heard of in the land.
As to domestic animals, their demands on us, did we read them aright, are not so much those of petitioners for mercy as of rightful claimants of justice. We have caused their existence, and are responsible that they should be on the whole happy and not miserable. We take their services to carry our burdens, to enhance our pleasures, to guard our homes and our flocks. In the case of many of them, we accept the fondest fidelity and an affection such as human beings scarcely give once in a lifetime. They watch for us, work for us, bear often weary imprisonment and slavery in our service, and not seldom mourn for us with breaking hearts when we die. If we conceive of an arbiter sitting by and watching alike our behavior and the poor brutes’ toil and love, can we suppose he would treat it as merely a piece of generosity on our part, which we were free to leave unfulfilled without blame, that we should behave considerately to such an humble friend, supply him with food, water, and shelter, forbear to overwork him, and end his harmless life at last with the least possible pain? Would he not demand it of us as the simplest matter of justice?[24]
For those who accept the Darwinian theory, and believe that the relationship between man and the brutes is not only one of similarity, but of actual kinship in blood, it would have seemed only natural that this new view should have brought forth a burst of fresh sympathy and tenderness. If our physical frames, with all their quivering nerves and susceptibilities to a thousand pains, be, indeed, only the four-footed creature’s body a little modified by development; if our minds only overlap and transcend theirs, but are grown out of those humbler brains; if all our moral qualities, our love and faith and sense of justice, be only their affection and fidelity and dim sense of wrong extended into wider realms,—then we bear in ourselves the irresistible testimony to their claims on our sympathy. And if, like so many of the disciples of the same new philosophy, we are unhappy enough to believe that both man and brute when laid in the grave awake no more, then, above all, it would seem that this common lot of a few pleasures and many pains, to be followed by annihilation, would move any heart to compassion. In the great, silent, hollow universe in which these souls believe themselves to stand, how base does it seem to turn on the weaker, unoffending beings around them, and spoil their little gleam of life and joy under the sun!
Nothing is more startling to me than the fact that some of the leading apostles of this philosophy, and even its respected author himself, should in one and the same breath tell us that an ape, for example, is actually our own flesh and blood, and that it is right and proper to treat apes after the fashion of Professors Munk and Goltz and Ferrier. These gentlemen, as regards the poor quadrumana, are rather “more than kin,” and rather “less than kind.”