Calderwood is sufficiently liberal to admit that, to a degree animals may be included in our affections. But Adolf Horwicz who has written the most complete, and, on the whole, most satisfactory analysis of the human feelings in existence, denies this. “Love is and remains a personal feeling,” he asserts; it “can only be referred to persons, not to things. The tenderness of American ladies towards dogs and cats is simply a gross emotional caricature.”
So it is, very often, especially in the case of ladies who neglect their children and make fashionable pets of animals, changing and exchanging them with the fashion. But it is simply absurd to mention this case as a fair instance of human love towards animals. How many of the greatest geniuses the world has produced have become famous for their affectionate devotion to their dogs! “A dog!” says an old English writer, “is the only thing on this earth that loves you more than he loves himself.” And should we be morally inferior to the dog—unable to love him in return? especially when we remember that “histories,” as Pope remarks, “are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
Vischer, the well-known German writer on æsthetics, goes so far as to admit that whenever he is in society his only wish is, “Oh, if there was only a dog here!”
There is something much nobler and deeper than sarcasm on humanity in Byron’s famous epitaph on his dog:—
“Near this spot
Are deposited the remains of one
Who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
And all the Virtues of man without his Vices.”