We human beings, in our conduct toward the races of beings associated with us on this planet, are almost pure savages. We are not even half civilised. And this fact is certain to bring upon us the criticism and condemnation of the more enlightened generations to come. The fact is apparent to-day, however—just as apparent as the barbarity of the Romans—to everyone who will take the trouble to rid himself of the prejudices which enslave and blind him, and view human phenomena from an un-human, extra-terrestrial point of view.
To most persons—to all except to a few—everything is simply a matter of habit and education. And a majority of persons, too, can become educated to one thing about as easily and completely as they can to another. In Mr. Huxley’s ‘Man’s Place in Nature’ there is reprinted from an old volume the picture of a butcher’s shop as it is said to have existed among the savage Anziques of Africa in the sixteenth century. Mr. Huxley says that the original engraving claims to represent an actual fact, and that he has himself no doubt but it does really stand for just what it purports to represent, especially since the fact has been corroborated by Du Chaillu in comparatively recent times. The fact for which this old picture stands is a good illustration of the power of custom in shaping human ideas. In this savage ‘market’ pretty much the same line of goods appears as is found in modern ‘markets,’ except that, instead of the quartered corpses of sheep and bullocks, there hang the shoulders, thighs, and gory heads of men. The butcher is represented as standing beside the chopping-block in the act of cutting up the leg of a man. A child’s head and other fragments of the human body are piled up on another block, and behind these on pegs are ranged the more pretentious wares of the establishment. ‘Presently we passed a woman,’ says Du Chaillu, in speaking of the cannibalism of the Fans, who were probably identical with those referred to two centuries earlier as Anziques. ‘She bore with her a piece of the thigh of a human body, just as we should go to market and carry thence a roast of steak.’ We can easily imagine (by the help of the sights we see every day) the anthropophagous crowd standing around giving their early morning orders, and the enterprising assassin hustling about to wait on them. One of them wants an arm, another wants a leg, another a liver, another a half-dozen nice fat ribs. One fellow wants a tender ‘cut’ of young girl’s sirloin, and another would like an old man’s calf for soup. A little naked urchin, who has had to wait a long time in order to get a chance to buy anything at all, exchanges a few shells for a section of human bologna. One fellow wants to know the price of the boy’s head which lies on the neighbouring block, and a woman complains that the baby’s brains which she bought the day before, and which were recommended as being especially ‘fresh and nice,’ turned out to be ‘bad.’ We can see them go home with their gruesome purchases, cook them, and sit down and eat them, discussing their flavour or their lack of it, and remarking their tenderness, toughness, or juiciness, and finally throwing the bones out to the dogs—all with as little thought of the immorality of it as ‘Thanksgiving’ gluttons have to-day at their feasts of blood. There may have been an occasional ‘visionary’ among these people fanatical enough to ‘refuse to eat meat,’ or even to protest against the practice. Probably there was. There generally are a few such discordants in every generation of vipers. But ‘fanatics’ in those days were in all likelihood, as they are to-day, too few to be troublesome.
To anyone familiar with the pliability of the human conscience, or with the soundness and depth of intellectual sleep, these things are neither impossible nor strange. There is so little looking into the essence of things, so little looking at things as they are, and so much thinking and doing as we are accustomed or told to think and do—there are, in fact, so few who can really think at all—that if we had been accustomed and taught to do so from childhood, and the world were practically unanimous in its conduct and teachings on the matter, very few of us indeed would not sit down to a breakfast of scrambled infant’s brains, a luncheon of cold boiled aunt, or a dinner of roast uncle, with as little compunction, perhaps with the same horrible merriment, as we to-day attend a ‘barbecue’ or a ‘turkey.’ Why should we not make hash and sausages out of our broken-down grandfathers and grandmothers just as we do out of our worn-out horses, and help out the pigeons at our killing carnivals with a few live peasants? How much more artistic and civilised to pile our tables on holy days with the gold and crimson of the fields and orchards than to load them with the dead! And yet how strangely few are mature enough to care anything at all about the matter.
Oh, the helplessness and irresponsibility of the human mind! There is no spontaneity, no originality, only the dead level of the machine. How impossible it is for us to think, to discover anything unassisted, to perceive anything after it has been pointed out to us even, if it is a little different from what we are used to! This, it seems to me, is one of the most pathetic things in all this world—this illimitable impotence, this powerlessness to inspect things from any other point of view than the one we inherit when we come into the world; to be a knave or lunatic (or the next thing to it), and never have the slightest suspicion of the fact. The human mind will certainly not always be this way. It will surely be different some time. It seems incredible that the planet will drag along in disgrace this way forever. The men of Europe and America are not so primitive as the junglemen, and the junglemen are superior in some respects to the quadrupeds and reptiles, and this gives reason for a little hope. But when that is the question, when will it be? In what distant time will the Golden Dream of our prophetic hours come to this poor darkened larva of a world? Ages upon ages after our little existences have gone out, and the detritus of our wasted bodies has wandered long in the labyrinths of the sod or been sown by aimless gusts over our native hills.
[1.] Hamley: Our Poor Relations; Boston, 1872.
[2.] I have many times seen cows chased all over their native premises, round and round, through fields and barnyards, across streams and over fences—chased until the poor things were utterly exhausted, and whipped and beaten until their faces and backs were covered with wounds—before they could be compelled to leave for ever the old farm where they had been born and raised.
X. Anthropocentric Ethics.
Anthropocentricism, which drifted down as a tradition from ancient times, and which for centuries shaped the theories of the Western world, but whose respectability among thinking people has now nearly passed away, was, perhaps, the boldest and most revolting expression of human provincialism and conceit ever formulated by any people. It was the doctrine that man was the centre about whom revolved all facts and interests whatsoever; and Judaism and its two children, Christianity and Mahometanism, were responsible for it. Everything, according to this conception, was interpreted in terms of human utility. Everything was made for man—including women. The sun and moon were luminaries, not worlds, hung there by the fatherly manufacturer of things for the convenience and delight of his children. The stars were perforations in the overarching concave through which eavesdropping prophets peered into celestial secrets, and errand-angels came and went with messages between gods and men. Not only the spheres in space, but the earth and all it contained—the rivers, seas, and seasons, all the plants that grow, and all the flowers that blow, and all the millions that swim and suffer in the waters and skies—were, according to this remorseless notion, the soulless adjuncts of man. Intrinsically they were meaningless. They had significance only as they served the human species. The hues and perfumes of flowers, the songs of birds, the dews, the breezes, the rains, the rocks, the ‘beasts of the field and the fowls of the air,’ the great forests, the mighty mountains, the fearful solitudes, even famine and pestilence, were all made for the being with the reinless imagination. Luther believed that the fly—festive little Musca domestica, who inhabits our homes, and sometimes unwittingly wanders over our tender places—was a pestiferous invention of the devil, maliciously sent to annoy him in his meditations. Garlic grew on the swamp brim as a handy antidote for human malaria. Fruits ripened in the summertime because the acids and juices which they contained were believed to be necessary for man’s health and refreshment. The great muscles of the ox were made to provide men with delicacies and leisure. The cloak of the ewe was made without any special thought, or without any thought at all, of the comforts of the ewe. It was placed there on the ewe by an all-tender creator, to be torn by his images from her bleeding back and worn. The fossil forms found in the rocks were not the bonâ fide remains of creatures that had lived and perished when the calcareous foundations of the continents were forming in ancient sea-beds. They were counterfeits, slyly designed by a suspicious providence, and sandwiched among the strata ‘to test human faith.’ The rainbow was a phenomenon with which the laws of reflection and refraction had nothing whatever to do. It was a sign or seal stamped on the retreating storms as a pledge that submersion would not be again used as a punishment for sinners. The universal ruler was conceived to be an individual of transcendent power and respectability, but was supposed to spend the most of his time and a good deal of anxiety on the regulation and repair of his illustrious likenesses.
The history of intellectual evolution is the history of disillusionment. The stars, we now know, are not hatchways, but worlds. They burn because they are fire. They blaze and circle in obedience to their own unchangeable inertias, just as the earth does. They blazed and wheeled when the elemental matters of the earth mingled indistinguishably with the vapours of the sun, and they will blaze and wheel when the last inhabitant of this clod has dissolved into the everlasting atoms. The earth is not the capital of cosmos nor the subject of celestial anxiety. The earth is a satrap of the sun—a subordinate among servants, not a sovereign with a retinue of stars. The earth and its contents were not made for man. They were not made at all. They were evolved. The concaves of the sea have been hollowed, the mountains upheaved, and the continents planted and peopled, by the same tendencies as those that hold the universes in their grasp. The primal matters of the earth came out of the substance of the sun, and by the play and activity of these elements and the play and activity of their derivatives were evolved all the multitudinous forms of land, fluid, plant, animal, and society. The flowers that ‘blush unseen’ do not necessarily ‘waste their sweetness on the desert air,’ as the poet so melodiously imagines. The colours and scents of flowers serve their purposes—which are to secure the services of insects in fertilisation—quite as well when unperceived, as when perceived by human senses. The non-human races of beings were not made for human beings. They were evolved—the higher forms from the lower forms, and the lower forms from still lower—just as the higher societies of men have been evolved, under the eye of history, out of barbarism and savagery. They are our ancestors. They have made human life and civilisation possible. They made their homes on primeval land patches when the continents we creep over were sleeping in the seas. They lived and loved and suffered and died in order that a being intelligent enough to analyse himself and recreant enough to pick their bones might come into the world.
There are supposed to be something like a million (maybe there are several million) species of inhabitants living on the earth. The human species is one of these. Not more than a few thousand of these species are seriously advantageous to men. The harmful and useless species are many times more numerous than the helpful. Now, if the 999,999 non-human species were made for the human species, why were the hundreds of thousands of species made that are of no possible human importance, and the hundreds of thousands of other species that are a positive injury? And if by some miraculous stretch of imagination the 999,999 species now living on the earth are conceived to have been made for man, why were the 10,000,000 or 15,000,000 of species made that lived and passed away before there was a human being in existence. Perhaps the traditionist will say—accustomed as he is to treat syllogisms with contempt—that they were made to invigorate human ‘faith.’
If the age of the human species be estimated at 50,000 years and the age of the life-process at 100,000,000 years, the time during which man has been on the earth is, when compared with the entire period during which the planet has been tenanted, as 1 to 2,000. And the time during which the earth has been inhabited—immense as that time is when compared with the little span of human history—is also insignificant when compared with the enormous lapse of time during which the planet was slowly cooling and solidifying preliminary to the existence of life. And the entire life of the planet—inconceivably vast as it is—is as nothing compared with that eternity, that duration without beginning or close, during which the sidereal millions have undergone, and are destined to continue to undergo, their countless and immeasurable transformations.