For those who, whether they believe in evolution or not, still hold faith in the existence of a divine Lord of man and brute, the reasons for sympathy are, in another way, still stronger. That the Christian religion did not, from the first, like the Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Brahminist, impress its followers with the duty of mercy to the brutes; that it was left to a few tender-hearted saints, like St. Francis, to connect the creatures in any way with the worship of the Creator, and to the later development of Protestantism to formulate any doctrine on the subject of duty toward them,—is a paradox which would need much space to explain. Modern religion, at all events, by whatever name it is called, seems tending more and more to throw an additional tender sacredness over our relations to the “unoffending creatures which he,” their Maker, “loves,” and to make us recognize a latent truth in the curiously hackneyed lines of Coleridge concerning him who “prayeth best” and also loveth best “both man and bird and beast.” Where that great and far-reaching softener of hearts, the sense of our own failures and offences, is vividly present, the position we hold to creatures who have never done wrong is always found inexpressibly touching. To be kind to them and rejoice in their happiness seems just one of the few ways in which we can act a god-like part in our little sphere, and display the mercy for which we hope in our turn. Whichever way we take it, I conceive we reach the same conclusion. The only befitting feeling for human beings to entertain toward brutes is, as the very word suggests, the feeling of humanity: or, as we may interpret it, the sentiment of sympathy, so far as we can cultivate fellow-feeling; of pity, so far as we know them to suffer; of mercy, so far as we can spare their sufferings; of kindness and benevolence, so far as it is in our power to make them happy.
There is nothing fanatical about this humanity. It does not call on us to renounce any of the useful or needful avocations of life as regards animals, but rather would it make the man imbued with it perform them all the better.[25] We assuredly need not, because we become humane, sacrifice the higher life for the lower, as in the wondrous Buddhist parable so beautifully rendered in the Light of Asia, where “Lord Buddha,” in one of his million lives, gives himself, out of pity, to be devoured by a famishing tiger who cannot feed her cubs, and
“The great cat’s burning breath
Mixed with the last sigh of such fearless love.”
We need not even copy the sweet lady in the “Sensitive Plant” who made the bees and moths and ephemeridæ her attendants:—
“But all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore in a basket of Indian woof
Into the rough woods far aloof,—
“In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.”
This is poetry not meant for practice, and yet even these hyperboles carry a breath as of Eden along with them. Of Eden did I say? Nay, rather of the later Paradise for which the soul of the greatest of the prophets yearned, where “they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.”
I will not attempt here to define how the sentiment of humanity to the brutes, thoroughly ingrained into a man’s heart, would make him decide the question of field sports. My own impression is that it would lead him to abandon first, and with utter disgust, such wretched amusements as pigeon-matches and battues of half-tame pheasants; and, later, those sports in which, as in fox-hunting and coursing and duck-shooting, the sympathy of the sportsman with his hounds and horse, or his greyhound or retriever, is uppermost in his mind, to the exclusion of the wild and scarcely seen object of his pursuit. In nine kinds of such sports, I believe, out of ten, it is rather a case of ill-divided sympathy for animals than of lack of it which inspires the sportsman; and not many would find enjoyment where neither horse nor dog had part,—like poor Robertson, of Brighton, sitting for hours in a tub in a marsh to shoot wild duck, and counting the period so spent as “hours of delight!”
But there is one practice respecting which the influence of such a sentiment of humanity as we have supposed must have an unmistakable result. It must put an absolute stop to vivisection. To accustom ourselves and our children to regard animals with sympathy; to beware of giving them pain, and rejoice when it is possible for us to give them pleasure; to study their marvellous instincts, and trace the dawnings of reason in their sagacious acts; to accept their services and their affection, and give them in return such pledges of protection as our kind words and caresses,—to do this, and then calmly consent to hand them over to be dissected alive, this is too monstrous to be borne. De deux choses l’une. Either we must cherish animals—and then we must abolish vivisection—or we must sanction vivisection; and then, for very shame’s sake, and lest we poison the springs of pity and sympathy in our breasts and the breasts of our children, we must renounce the ghastly farce of petting or protecting animals, and pretending to recognize their noble and lovable qualities. If love and courage and fidelity, lodged in the heart of a dog, have no claim on us to prevent us from dissecting that heart even while yet it beats with affection; if the human-like intelligence working in a monkey’s brain do not forbid (but rather invite) us to mutilate that brain, morsel by morsel, till the last glimmering of mind and playfulness die out in dulness and death,—if this be so, then, in Heaven’s name, let us at least have done with our cant of “humanity,” and abolish our Acts of Parliament, and dissolve our Bands of Mercy, and our three hundred Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty throughout the world.
The idea of vivisection (to use the phrase of its two thousand advocates who memorialized Sir Richard Cross) rests on the conception of an animal (a dog, for example) as “a carnivorous creature, valuable for purposes of research,”—a mechanism, in short, of nerves and muscles, bones and arteries, which, as they added, it would be a pity to “withdraw from investigation.” The crass materialism which thus regards such a creature as a dog (and would, doubtless, if its followers spoke out, be found similarly to regard a man) is at the opposite pole of thought and feeling from the recognition of the animal in its higher nature as an object of our tenderness and sympathy. We cannot hold both views at once. If we take the higher one, the lower must become abhorrent in our eyes. There is, there ought to be, no question in the matter of a little more or a little less of torture, or of dispute whether anæsthetics, when they can be employed, usually effect complete and final or only partial and temporary insensibility; or of whether such processes as putting an animal into a stove over a fire till it expires in ten or twenty minutes ought to be called “baking it alive,” or described by some less distressing and homely phraseology. It is the simple idea of dealing with a living, conscious, sensitive, and intelligent creature as if it were dead and senseless matter against which the whole spirit of true humanity revolts. It is the notion of such absolute despotism as shall justify not merely taking life, but converting the entire existence of the animal into a misfortune, which we denounce as a brutal misconception of the relations between the higher and the lower creatures, and an utter anachronism in the present stage of human moral feeling. A hundred years ago, had physiologists frankly avowed that they recognized no claims on the part of the brutes which should stop them from torturing them, they would have been only on the level of their contemporaries. But to-day they are behind the age; ay, sixty years behind the legislature and the poor Irish gentleman who “ruled the houseless wilds of Connemara,” and had the glory of giving his name to Martin’s Act. How their claim for a “free vivisecting table” may be looked back upon a century to come, we may perhaps foretell with no great chance of error. In his last book, published ten years ago, Sir Arthur Helps wrote these memorable words: “It appears to me that the advancement of the world is to be measured by the increase of humanity and the decrease of cruelty.... I am convinced that, if an historian were to sum the gains and losses of the world at the close of each recorded century, there might be much which was retrograde in other aspects of human life and conduct, but nothing could show a backward course in humanity” (pp. 195, 196). As I have said ere now, the battle of mercy, like that of freedom
“Once begun,
Though often lost, is always won.”