“The further we advance in knowledge, the more we apprehend the true meaning of realities, the more do we understand simple but very serious matters which the hurry (entraînement) of life makes us neglect. Life! Death! The daily murder, which feeding upon other animals implies—those hard and bitter problems sternly placed themselves before my mind. Miserable contradiction! Let us hope that there may be another globe in which the base, the cruel fatalities of this may be spared to us.”[256]
Extolling the greater respect of the Hindus for other life, as exhibited in their sacred scriptures, Michelet vindicates the pre-eminently beneficent character of the Cow, in Europe so ungratefully treated by the recipients of her bounty:—
“Let us name first, with honour, his beneficent nurse—so honoured and beloved by him—the sacred Cow, who furnished the happy nourishment—favourable intermediate between insufficient herbs and flesh, which excites horror. The Cow, whose milk and butter has been so long the sacred offering. She alone supported the primitive people in the long journey from Bactria to India. By her, in face of so many ruins and desolations—by this fruitful nurse, who unceasingly renovates the earth for him, he has lived and always lives.”[257]
In his Bird he constantly preaches the faith that can remove mountains—the faith that regards the regeneration and pacification of earth as the proper destiny of our species:—
“The devout faith which we cherish at heart, and which we teach in these pages, is that man will peaceably subdue the whole earth, when he shall gradually perceive that every adopted being, accustomed to a domesticated life, or at least to that degree of friendship and companionship of which his nature is susceptible, will be a hundred times more useful to him than he can be with his throat cut (qu’il ne pourrait l’être égorgé). Man will not be truly man until he shall labour seriously for that which the Earth expects from him—the pacification and harmonious union (ralliement) of all living Nature. Hunt and make war upon the lion and the eagle if you will, but not upon the Weak and Innocent.”
This Michelet never wearies of repeating, and he returns again and again to a truth which is scorned by the modern self-seeking and money-getting, as it was by the fighting, wholly barbarous, world:—
“Conquerors have never failed to turn into derision this gentleness, this tenderness for animated Nature. The Persians, the Romans in Egypt, our Europeans in India, the French in Algeria, have often outraged and stricken these innocent brothers of man—the objects of his ancient reverence. Cambyses slew the sacred Cow; a Roman the Ibis who destroyed unclean reptiles. But what means the Cow? The fecundity of the country. And the Ibis? Its salubrity. Destroy these animals, and the country is no longer habitable. That which has saved India and Egypt through so many misfortunes and preserved their fertility, is neither the Nile nor the Ganges. It is respect for other life, the mildness and the [comparatively] gentle heart of man.
“Profound in meaning was the speech of the Priest of Saïs to the Greek Herodotus—‘You shall be children always.’
“We shall always be so—we men of the West—subtle and graceful reasoners, so long as we shall not have comprehended, with a simple and more exhaustive view, the motive of things. To be a child, is to seize life only by partial glimpses. To be a man is to be fully conscious of all its harmonious unity. The child disports himself, shatters and destroys; he finds his happiness in undoing. And science, in its childhood, does the same. It cannot study unless it kills. The sole use which it makes of a living mind, is, in the first place, to dissect it. None carry into scientific pursuits that tender reverence for life which Nature rewards by unveiling to us her mysteries.”[258]
Like Shelley, he firmly believed in the indefinite amelioration of our world by the ultimate triumph of principles of humaneness, so that the “sting of death” and of pain might almost, if not entirely, be removed:—