Anthropologist: Because, as the poet says, "Nature is one with rapine." It is natural to kill. Do you dare to impugn Nature?
Vegetarian: Not at all. What I dare to impugn is your incorrect description of Nature. There is a great deal more in Nature than rapine and slaughter.
Anthropologist: What? Do not the beasts and birds prey on one another? Do not the big fish eat the little fish? Is it not all one universal struggle for existence, one internecine strife?
Vegetarian: No; that is just what it is not. There are two principles at work in Nature—the law of competition and the law of mutual aid. There are carnivorous animals and non-carnivorous, predatory races and sociable races; and the vital question is—to which does man belong? You obscure the issue by these vague and meaningless appeals to the "laws of Nature," when, in the first place, you are quoting only part of Nature's ordinance, and, secondly, have not yourself the least intention of conforming even to that part.
Anthropologist: I beg your pardon. In what do I not conform to Nature?
Vegetarian: Well, are you in favour of cannibalism, let us say, or the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes?
Anthropologist: Good gracious, my dear sir! I must entreat you——
Vegetarian: Exactly! You are horrified at the mere mention of such things. Yet these habits are as easily justified as flesh-eating, if you take "Nature" as your model, without specifying whose nature? The nature of the conger and the dog-fish, or the nature of civilised man? Pray tell me that, Mr. Anthropologist, and then our conversation may not be wholly irrelevant.
The idea that the Darwinian doctrine of the "struggle of life" justifies any barbarous treatment of inferior races is ridiculed by so distinguished an authority as Prince Kropotkin, who points out that Darwin does not teach this. "He proves that there is a struggle for existence in order to put a check on the inordinate increase of species. But this struggle is not to be understood in a crude and exclusive sense; there is a law of competition, but there is also—what is still more important—a law of mutual aid, and as soon as the scientist leaves his laboratory, and comes out into the open woods and meadows, he sees the importance of this law. Only those animals who are mutually helpful are really fitted to survive; it is not the strong, but the co-operative species that endure."[[8]] So, too, with reference to the strange notion that a guide for human conduct may be deduced from some particular animal instinct, taken at haphazard from its surroundings, a timely warning is addressed to such crude reasoners by Professor J. Arthur Thomson: "What we must protest against is that one-sided interpretation, according to which individualistic competition is Nature's sole method of progress.... The precise nature of the means employed and ends attained must be carefully considered, when we seek from the records of animal evolution support or justification for human conduct."[[9]]
It may be said, however, that though man is fitted to co-operate peacefully with his fellows, he is not bound by any such ties of brotherhood to the lower animals, and that it is "natural" that he should prey on the non-human races, even if it be not natural that he should seek pleasure at the cost of his fellow-man. But, in reality, Nature knows no such bridgeless gulf between the human and the non-human intelligence; and it is impossible, in the light of modern science, to draw any such absolute line of demarcation between man and "the animals" as in the now discredited theory of Descartes. We are learning to get rid of these "anthropocentric" delusions, which, as has been pointed out by Mr. E. P. Evans, "treat man as a being essentially different and inseparably set apart from all other sentient creatures, to which he is bound by no ties of mental affinity or moral obligation"; whereas, in fact, "man is as truly a part and product of Nature as any other animal, and this attempt to set him up as an isolated point outside of it is philosophically false and morally pernicious."[[10]]